Re: Where's APL going?

JoeGreen wrote:

> There has been a raging debate in engineering circles in Canada regarding
> M$ "software engineers". We are seeing increasing concerns for the costs
> and consequences for "crashing software" when it brings about very serious
> safety consequences, such as running out of gas over Gimli,

Uh, the Gimli Glider incident took place in 1983--I seriously doubt that
anything from Microsoft was involved unless one of their employees just by
chance happened to be a passenger on the plane. And in any case that
incident was not due to "crashing software" but to someone making a mistake
in converting from Metric to English units.

> or not having
> full engine power on final approach to Toronto Pearson Airport, to name
> only two examples with Air Canada.

I'm sorry, but I can't find any record of such an incident. There is one in
which an aircraft landing it Frederickton was unable to complete a
go-around due to turbine lag, but that had nothing to do with computers.

> You all seem to forget that the day for the software charlatan in over,
> the markets have discounted the dot.com into a bust, and we now are facing
> the huge cleanup of mountains and mountains of doubtful software that
> people are increasingly reluctant to ride on.

While looking for the second incident I did find a record of one involving
an Air Cathay flight that was a bonfide software problem, but in that case
the problem had been identified and a fix developed three years previously
and the fix had not been implemented because the government agency whose
approval was needed was dragging their feet--it is difficult to blame the
software developer for that one.

> Doubtful software lacking robustness and integrity is everywhere,
> spreading like a pandemic and affecting everything it infects. In some
> machines today, more resources are used to protect against "viruses" than
> are used to operate the tasks at hand. Even NASA has not escaped, even
> NASA has lost expensive spacecraft because of poorly prepared and written
> programs that obviously did not correctly reflect the concepts of its
> designers.

Actually, they've lost _cheap_ spacecraft as the result of an ill-conceived
economy program.

> We are passing through a profoundly "anti-intellectual" period inside most
> North American corporations that do not value properly secured and
> domestically produced algorithm components to modern industry. Much of
> this has been driven by scalar profit oriented mentalities that lack the
> foresight and vision to understand where tomorrow's meal is going to come
> from. I am sure you who follow these hype artists on Wall Street and Bay
> Street will not have much difficulty in spotting who they are.
>
> Dr. Iverson's Notation, which is the foundation of APL, has enduring
> intellectual value and sooner or later it will re-emerge to again address
> difficult conceptual problems that underpin our economy and our way of
> life.
>
> One last point. I wonder if anyone has calculated the actual cost in lost
> productivity that a single M$ workstation costs a company for the
> "uploads", the "updates", the "security features", and the "patches" that
> correct the previous "patches"? Its this loss of productivity that is a
> mere symtom of a much deeper problem that actually stems all the way back
> to how M$ subverted

"subverted"? Now that's a nice little piece of spin that bears no relation
at all to any kind of truth.

> a nice little company that was building integrity into
> their S100 systems, a company called Digital Research.

Are you by any chance laboring under the misconception that Digital Research
was a _hardware_ vendor? They produced an operating system and a very
primitive one at that. IBM gave them a fair chance to get their product on
the IBM PC. DR would not meet IBM's price and was unable to deliver
software on schedule and was a bit shirty as well. Microsoft met the
price, delivered the product on time and within budget, and ate DR's lunch.
That is hardly "subversion", that is gross stupidity on the part of the
Digital Research.

> Look inside InTel

What is "InTel"?

> to see the kind of corporate culture that has been spawned there by the
> scalar minds that pretend to guide the computer industry.

So you've been "inside" this company? Care to give us some examples?

> No, bullshit baffles brains only for so long, eventually smart people go
> back and retrace their footsteps and when they do, they will find
> Inverson's Notation brilliantly shining as when he first conceived of it
> nearly half a century ago.
>
> APL will make a comeback because "cream always rises". Its time has come.

I think that even the most rabid APL advocate who actually knows something
about programming would be reluctant to suggest that it was an optimal
solution for embedded control systems, and there's nothing magic about
Iverson's notation that makes it immune to error.

I think we have an example of "with friends like you . . ."

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
.

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