Interpreter Recommentation for Windows
Kim Changjune
I have some exprience with J but a novice in APL. I'd like to learn APL
on my windows machine. Is there a decent APL interpreter (freeware
preferred) that's easy for beginners?
June
Jimserac
Beware.
Only a few vendors so they have a virtual monopoly on Windows APL
software
and charge exorbitant (in my opinion) prices for them.
IBM charges about $1,500 for theirs (last time I looked) but does offer
a functional demo
for free that lasts quite a while before shutting off.
Dyalog APL, said to be a very nice system and .NET compliant, is very
expensive and has no Windows demo.
There is another Windows APL vendor, whoose name escapes me at the
moment
and I think you can get a demo for about $100 from them (but it will
most likely be crippled in some way and then you must decide if you
want to buy their full product, again for a lot of money.
There are some free dos based interpreters that will give you a feel
for the language
(search for TryAPL2 and APLSE among several out there).
Others may suggest better alternatives, I hope.
J
Morten Kromberg
> Dyalog APL, said to be a very nice system and .NET compliant, is very
> expensive and has no Windows demo.
The first part is true ;-). The middle is debatable; for commercial
use, the Dyalog IDE is in the same price range as Visual Studio. The
tail end is no longer true:
For non-commercial / personal use, Dyalog APL is available for £50
(with electronic documentation). Commercial evaluation licenses are
also possible, give us a call or send an e-mail to discuss your
requirements.
Regards,
Morten Kromberg
Dyalog Ltd.
Morten Kromberg
Jimserac wrote:
> Only a few vendors so they have a virtual monopoly on Windows APL
> software and charge exorbitant (in my opinion) prices for them.
I can count at least 5 (five) APL Vendors on the Windows platform.
Compared to other languages, I don't think that's TOO bad :-)
Given the level of service and the productivity that APL vendors and
systems generally provide, a lot of people find them very worth while.
Having said that, we agree that it would be good if the entry level
price for APL systems was lower. Dyalog is now providing free
educational systems, low cost non-commercial licenses, and we are
working on other ideas for making it easier to get started with APL.
Morten
brian.b.m...@lmco.com
Morten Kromberg wrote:
> For non-commercial / personal use, Dyalog APL is available for £50
> (with electronic documentation).
The web site lists a personal edition of Dyalog APL for Linux for
£500. I don't
see any prices for Windows versions.
--- Brian
Jimserac
Indeed, they must feel that their interpreter is so spectacular
that there is no need to discuss the plebian matter of price.
Therefore there is no mention of it. Once you have
read their specifications, simply get a blank checque,
contact one of their vendors and then fill in whatever
amount they tell you.
J
Jimserac
At least 5 Windows Platform APL vendors?? At least?
I'm intrigued. I hate for you to give away the names of your
competitors
but I'd like to know who they are. I know of Dyalog, IBM's APL2 and
APLX.
and WinAPL . Who else is there?
Thanks
J
Morten Kromberg
effect, the price for the non-commercial Linux product will be £200.
The reason that the price is higher than under Windows is that (until
further notice), our GUI is built upon a 3rd party product which
provides a Windows API emulation, and we have to pay them for every
copy we sell.
Our current web page leaves a little to be desired (but it won't live
much longer). You can find the current price list by clicking on the
"Dyalog APL Version 10.1" link on the left, and then chosing a currency
at the top right of the Version 10.1 announcement.
Morten Kromberg
You have probably mentioned the four most significant vendors. If you
read the excellent APL FAQ which Sam Sirlin periodically posts to this
group (Google found me a recent copy at:
http://www.uni-giessen.de/faq/archiv/apl-faq/msg00000.html
... you will see several more systems which are available under
Windows. Quite a few of them are free (at least for personal use), and
some of the free ones are very interesting.
Fortunately (perhaps you do not agree?), some of us have been able to
convince enough customers that our commercial products and services are
worth paying for. We would love it if the market was a bit larger, so
we could give the product away and live off support contracts from
large customers whose businesses depended on it.
In fact, we're working hard to make that happen. At Dyalog, we believe
that the time is approaching where a suitably Object-Oriented and
properly-connected APL system can expand into new markets.
With all due respect, I think your ideas about the economics of the APL
market, and the motives of APL vendors in setting prices, are based on
unreliable information.
Morten
Mike Kent
> Jimserac wrote:
>
>
>>Dyalog APL, said to be a very nice system and .NET compliant, is very
>>expensive and has no Windows demo.
>
>
> The first part is true ;-). The middle is debatable; for commercial
> use, the Dyalog IDE is in the same price range as Visual Studio.
Dyalog APL is a great product and all things (like, the size of the
market) considered I suspect it is "fairly" priced. Still ...
MS VS 2005 Pro is priced at USD 799, with MSDN Professional, USD 1199.
I would not call that the same price range as Dyalog APL. It includes
a number of tools (like the database designer) that Dyalog does not
supply, and an environment that provides pretty well cradle-to-grave
support for coding, building, and deploying small- to medium-scale
products. Realistically. Dyalog APL is more nearly comparable to
the Standard versions of the single-language MS components (no longer
supplied, alas) that cost about USD 500 a couple of years ago.
I was going to remark on run-time license costs but I think I recall
that you dropped this, except for Linux to cover your Mainwin costs.
>The tail end is no longer true:
Which is very much a Good Thing.
> For non-commercial / personal use, Dyalog APL is available for £50
> (with electronic documentation).
IMO you would be better off to give away a version with these restrictions
on use and no support obligation. At USD 100 I don't think you will get a
lot of "that looks interesting, I might try it" users and with your license
restrictions you won't get a lot of "I can do real work with this" users.
So give it away. Don't even make a CD, have it as d/l only, and if you want
to be nice/encouraging, host a newsgroup for users. You'll get more takers
and (I believe) you won't forgo noticeable revenue. This is more or less
the MS "Express" edition approach.
BTW I did not find any reference to the restricted version at the Dyalog.com
web site; perhaps you could post a link here?
Morten Kromberg
I'm not sure we really disagree on this...
Visual Studio DOES contain much more stuff, but my honest (biased)
opinion is that the trained user is considerably more "empowered" with
an APL system. Many of the built-in tools in VS are not really adequate
for the type of dynamic solutions that people build with APL.
With Dyalog APL, you are also paying for support: If you have a problem
while using Dyalog APL, you get to talk to someone who can probably
give you some advice, even if your problem is not caused by a bug in
our system.
We feel that it is important to provide the support; compared to other
programming communities, as the APL User community probably contains a
significantly larger proportion of users who are "domain experts" in a
field other than Information Technology: For these users, our job is in
many ways to wrap the stuff they have to use but don't want to know
about, inside language or library components of the APL system. We
spend a considerable amount of effort helping people understand things
like what a COM or .NET object "is".
The large corporate users, who are generally IT-savvy, appreciate the
high level of support and responsiveness for other reasons.
We DO want to bring the price of the entry level system down, and
collect our revenue from large commercial customers who rely on our
service and the development of "enterprise" features that they need. We
will shortly be "releasing" a new web page, which will also show the
non-commercial license; the current web site does not - and which will
announce our new price schedule, which will take the first (admittedly
small) steps in the direction mentioned above.
In time, we would also like to make the non-commercial licenses
available as free downloads. We are looking at how to make this
possible for Linux as well (note that even now, Dyalog APL/W actually
runs very well under Wine on both Linux and the Mac). However, we have
been quite pleasantly surprised by the number of people who HAVE
already purchased the existing license. At this time, we are actually
holding back a bit, as we feel that we want to spend considerable
effort on producing a set of modern, partly object oriented examples
and class libraries, so that these are available to newcomers. We don't
really want to expose too many new users to the technology before we
can provide better training (and "marketing") materials, and "open
source" shared libraries if possible. At the moment, we can not live up
to the expectations of "young people" trying to learn a language via
the internet.
There is a DyalogUsers Yahoo group, formed independently by our users,
which is working so well that we don't really feel that we need to host
one ourselves. We will link to this from our new site, and will be
reviewing whether we should start adding developer blogs, wikis, etc
during the next few months.
The Dyalog development group has approximately doubled in size since
the company was acquired last year, and we are still searching for new
members for the next generation of language developers. We are gearing
up to invest considerable resource in achieving the above goals over
the next few years.
Come to the Dyalog User Conference in Helsingør (Denmark), October
16th-20th, to meet the new folks and help us decide where to spend our
energy for the next few years! (For more info, see
http://www.truepr.co.uk/news/dl/02/).
Regards,
Morten Kromberg
Dyalog Ltd.
Paul Mansour
The Dyalog interpreter is phenomenal, and I highly recommend it. The
documentation is superb. Get yourself the personal, non-commercial
version, at 50 pounds, it's close enough to freeware. (I'm hoping they
will just make it free and downloadable from the web site soon -- I
think they will)
Paul Mansour
www.flipdb.com
Dick Bowman
news:1157530506....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
>[... deleted ...] At this time, we are actually
> holding back a bit, as we feel that we want to spend considerable
> effort on producing a set of modern, partly object oriented examples
> and class libraries, so that these are available to newcomers.[...
deleted ...]
But if you wait until you're "ready" too much time may have passed.
Question is whether these libraries (resources?) all need to come from
Dyalog (or be blessed by Dyalog?) or whether we in userland (at least those
unencumbered by other considerations) should also be putting stuff
together. I think there's a distinction between open source projects like
OpenOffice (where the goal is to make "a product" and cohesion is
paramount) and building up "programmer toolboxes" (where diversity might be
valued). It would be good if there was time during the Dyalog conference
to discuss how vendors and existing users might interrelate to move APL
forward in this way (but I do think we've been down similar roads before).
Jimserac
Well said.
Jim
Bob Cain
> Kim,
>
> The Dyalog interpreter is phenomenal, and I highly recommend it. The
> documentation is superb. Get yourself the personal, non-commercial
> version, at 50 pounds, it's close enough to freeware. (I'm hoping they
> will just make it free and downloadable from the web site soon -- I
> think they will)
I will the very moment complex numbers are made intrinsic and fully
integrated into all operations that handle reals. I do DSP and EE
stuff, ya see. :-)
Bob
--
"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler."
A. Einstein
Morten Kromberg
longish time since the APL community invested seriously in libraries.
However, recent changes in technology, markets, and - this may be a
controversial point: the increase in awareness of the value of
libraries in the APL community - means that we think the time is right
to make a serious effort again. I think that the chances of success are
better than they have been since we came off the mainframe (a lot of
people had good libraries back then, when they lived in larger
communities).
We are planning events at the October conference where we will try to
encourage library development. We recognise that nobody has a more
direct interest in creating these libraries than APL vendors, and I
believe we should take responsibility for their creation, even if we
fail to enrol the help of the community. However, we would like nothing
more than the emergence of an "Open Source" library which was
maintained by our user community.
Having said that: We certainly intend to have strong opinions about
what should be in the libraries and how they should be coded - and we
will be prepared to argue! The libraries must be written in a clear and
well-documented style, with references to knowledge and skills that
users joining the community are likely to have - and solving problems
that new users are likely to be looking for solutions to.
We believe that the first priority is to create a set of libraries
aimed at making it easy for new users to get started, rather than
pleasing the existing community. I believe a small set of libraries can
go a long way towards achieve the former, but I'm not sure I can deal
with the amount of diversity required to achieve the latter :-).
If the user community has other interests and wants to build other
tools, that is fine - and we will be prepared to support many such
initiatives, but I think the most important initial goal is to make is
easy to "see the light" and learn how to implement simple, "modern"
solutions, using APL as a Tool of Thought.
Morten
