What is the correct result?

[johnb]

(03-19-2024 05:45 PM)carey Wrote:  I love the well-deserved hilarity about APL's opaqueness, but in its defense, APL is an executable math notation. Iverson developed his math notation while teaching algorithms at Harvard in the late 1950's and, after being denied tenure (writing a book wasn't considered as tenure worthy as writing a paper), was offered a position at IBM where Iverson's math notation became a live programming language. APL does away with the step of needing to convert mathematical algorithms into code - an algorithm written in APL math notation IS the code, i.e., the middle man is eliminated and the math is executable. At least, that's how it was supposed to work

I'm encouraged that others here are familiar with APL as well. And I did not know about Iverson being denied tenure!

Yeah, at one time, IBM thought that APL was the language to save businessmen from reliance upon programmers! Hard to imagine how they arrived at that, if you've seen any nontrivial APL!! But they actually had short film clips showing how a businessperson could sit down to a live terminal session (because timesharing was futuristic and sexy!) and get answers with just a few keystrokes.

A few years later, they thought the same thing about SQL...

Today, a few idiots are suggesting just training a Generative AI on your business data and asking it questions. I guess it's cheaper than hiring consultants from a big-5 firm, and the answer quality might be similar...