Transcript

Many thanks to Rodrigo Girão Serrão for producing this transcription
[ ] reference numbers refer to Show Notes

00:00:00 [Conor Hoekstra]

OK, this is gonna...

00:00:03 [CH]

Everyone can hear me still right? We're going to cut this out or Bob will cut this out.

00:00:09 [Bob Therriault]

No, we're going to leave this in.

00:00:23 [CH]

Welcome to another episode of Array Cast. My name is Conor and today we have with us Adám, Bob and Stephen and we're going to go quickly around in that order and do introductions and then have a couple announcements and hop into the topic for today's episode.

00:00:35 [Adám Brudzewsky]

Adám Brudzewsky, the APL programmer here.

00:00:38 [BT]

I'm Bob Therriault and I am a J enthusiast.

00:00:41 [Stephen Taylor]

Stephen Taylor. I'm also an APL programmer and q programmer these days too.

00:00:46 [CH]

And as mentioned before, my name is Conor. I am a day to day C++ programmer, but an array language enthusiast and combinator enthusiast at large. And with that, I think we have two announcements from Adám, so I'll throw it to him. And then after that, Bob will introduce today's topic, right?

00:01:00 [AB]

So we kind of joked about it before, but after the introduction of the new APL logo,[1] then became time to create some merch for the Array Cast.[2] We'll put links in the show notes and head over there, and grab it quickly. Designs may change in the future, so these might actually be collectors items for you. And some of that. And then there's a really cool initiative by some, some kids and high school kids. I think they are and and they're creating something they call the Esolang Conference 2022. Uh, not really eso langs in in the sense of languages that are intentionally difficult or strange to to program in. But languages that are not there's so much mainstream and they want to get more attention and focus to those. And one of the languages that they are trying to bring attention to is is APL and array programming in general. We'll put links to their social media and website as well. [3] Check it out, especially if you are a student and interested in this kind of thing.

00:02:06 [BT]

And the topic for today is actually this podcast it's sort of a reflexive thing, and we're doing this because it's a year, well, just over a year that we've actually been doing this podcast and people may not realize sort of how it started, and all the work that goes into it and the different people that are involved in it so. So that's sort of what we're going to be talking about today. So if you came here today expecting all sorts of talk about your latest a bit of wisdom about transpose or leading axis theory or a fascinating interview with someone who is a multi multi millionaire who'd leveraged the array languages into a a career and a fortune, and how to do that yourselves? This probably isn't well, unless this podcast turns into a big moneymaker. But I don't see that happening because it took us a year to do merch anyway. How this how this whole thing started and I I think Conor shares this with me that both of us listened to an awful lot of podcasts and over and over again I I was actually the actual origin of it. I was listening to the ADSP podcast [4] and Conor actually said I don't think there are any podcasts on the array languages? And when he said that, I thought you know what I've been thinking that for a long time. And if he listens to a lot of podcasts and I listen to a lot of podcasts and we can't find any of these like these. Podcasts then maybe there aren't any, and as far as I know there are no other podcasts about the array languages, so that was what instigated it and that that set the germ in my head and I think I talked to a couple of people in J about it and was actually thinking we're doing more of a a J Array Cast. [5] You know more just with the J language. And and actually, the original idea I had was to do more of a weekly thing where what we did is we actually recapped what was going on in the forums, because there's always stuff going on in the J forums and and it isn't usually put together in a way that you know, sort of has a coherency to it, but there's there are coherent thoughts going through all these different streams that was met with I would say probably underwhelming interest 'cause there's a lot of work involved in that. I don't think anybody was looking to take on the extra work, and there's a certain amount of expertise that's required to do a podcast as well. You have to know how to record. You have to know how to edit. You have to know how to do a lot of things, and I think a lot of people get scared off by that. Having said that, to people you shouldn't be scared off by the expertise in podcasts, it's getting easier and easier and there are few elemental things you'll need to learn. But this particular podcast we do on zoom and record it that way and it's as simple as that. We set up individual recordings, get to individual streams, gets fed through to me, i do some editing the key to it though is the people on it and that is where I started to talk to people and I think it may be time to throw it over to Stephen just for a bit because I think it was the centenary of Ken Iverson's birth [6] that we did the celebration for. And I think at that point is when I first started talking to you about the podcast.

00:05:30 [ST]

Can't even remember a year ago. Sometimes it seems like we've always been doing this. It's it's certainly good to sit around and shoot it, shoot the fat over these things, and I've been enjoying learning about things going on in the array languages. I have no idea what's happening and hearing some of the back stories to stuff that I remember partly from decades ago. That guy was doing this. Oh yeah, it was your idea. Was it? Who knows? But it's it's been hugely enjoyable for me, but more like a social occasion. Our recording session.

00:06:10 [BT]

Yeah, and and then from that point when I talked to Stephen about it, I think I'm trying to think of how I got. I think I reached out to Rich Park first. Richard Park. And and that was because he was doing more of the video at that time and I think Richard quickly and this is sort of a common thread within working with people, there's, there's immediately. Oh, you don't really want me, you want this person and I I certainly am willing to take any suggestions from people who know a lot more than I do. So Richard at that point suggested Adám that Adám has been on a lot of them. Richard has been on a lot too. They're both very good at explaining APL and and and so that was kind of how a damn got roped into this. I'm not sure whether he realized what he was going to that hooked into, but he's been here for a bunch. He you got anything to say about being involved in this then?

00:07:07 [AB]

I think you're right that it did start just you still start discussions at this insanity of a 5 or something. We'll link to that. Obviously that's all recording of that. Uhm, I mean it's been. It's been very enjoyable. I really look forward to to these meetings. I mean, uh, as a side effect, we're creating content that people enjoy. Currently I have just lost spending this hour with the rest of you. Uh, I mean it's. It's also. It's also hard work, but it's it's good to explain things and we get, i really appreciate it, also that we get feedback. We do get emails coming in from people and people mention it and people with some sort of right. In in a chat room, they see my my first name and saying oh are you the one from the Array Cast? Oh yeah. So that's been really great. Really appreciate the initiative.

00:08:03 [ST]

Adám, were you surprised by the response to this 'cause I was astonished by the response by how many people piled in on the Iverson centenary.

00:08:12 [AB]

I don't think I had any particular expectation. I mean, a lot of people have touched APL throughout the years, even if they've then gone on to do other things, and the fact that, oh, then they get reminded about this and come back when it's something that's been publicized.

00:08:29 [BT]

I I thought I was really impressed with the the Iverson centenary. It was, it was well put together and congratulations to you, Stephen. 'cause I think you were one of the prime organizers of it. But the people that the voices it brought in, that you I hadn't heard before. And some that I hadn't heard for a long time was really impressive and it also showed sort of the range of the language. There's so many different ways to approach it and people and there's so many characters with the array languages I don't know. I don't think it's it's only array languages they tend to attract people who have either strong characters, strong opinions, or different points of view, but I think those are the ones that stick around because I think if you if you're going to work with these languages, you're going to have some resistance, and most people who want to go with the flow won't, won't, you know, put up with the weird looks you get from somebody you know when you show them some code you wrote and they just, you know, roll their eyes and go well, you can't, you know. And and I I think that's that's some reason you get a lot of people that are very interesting. There's a lot of really interesting people, and one of the things I will say is this podcast exposed me to the APL Farm [7] and the the number of people in there with the different languages BQN, k I'm trying to think there's, i think there's Neil is in there as well. There's there's a whole range of and and generationally younger programmers, writing interpreters and compilers for the array languages, which is fascinating to see. At one point, in a pretty short discussion, we talked about the fact there's only one J icon and I think it's because nobody really wants to take on writing that kind of stuff. I think the younger programmers tend to be much more interested in seeing how they would create their own array language, and I think that's a great learning opportunity. I think at times it's a bit of a distraction, but I think if you learn something from it it's worth doing. Anyway, that brings me around the corner because one of the things when we started to get the experts from different areas and I I always say I'm an enthusiast because honestly I am only an enthusiast. I'm not an expert. My, well, you don't want anyone know my whole background but but it's not necessarily in programming. I've never programmed professionally. But I knew that I would need a host and so I sort of went back to the guy who was on ADSP, and had shown such enthusiasm for the array languages and and honestly conor Conor is a combination of someone who brings a learner's mind to the process, which is really important, but also level enthusiasm that I think is is really important and I I will turn it over to the Husky voiced conor Hoekstra.

00:11:35 [CH]

So I'm actually interested to hear the rest of the Array Cast origin story, because from my perspective I did not hear about any of this, you know back channeling? You know finding co hosts or panelists from from from my point of view, I was YouTube streaming, [8] I don't know, it was early 2021, maybe February March. And then I just sort of off the cuff had said at some point you know I will start a APL Cast or something like that. I just don't have time right now and Bob happened to be listening and then Bob emailed me. I tried to find the exact e-mail but couldn't find the initial e-mail that was you being like hey, this is a great idea, making it seem like that was the genesis. Uhm, little did I know that apparently for a few months beforehand, something else I had said on a different platform on my other podcast had already sparked this in your mind, and so from my point of view, I thought the genesis of this was a YouTube stream. So what happened in between the Centennial and sort of discussions there and then it it just happened to be that you know a few months later was the right time and then you heard me say this thing you're like, oh perfect, now that's the opportunity to reach out or.

00:12:51 [BT]

As all good producers, I was stalking you. I was just waiting for my time to pounce. And and I think at that, at that point, the thing that you were doing was you were trying to rewrite the J source in C++. Is that what the the thing you were trying to do with? [9]

00:13:14 [CH]

I think rewrite's generous, but yeah, just take the J source and put a modern C++ twist on it so you know reformat it. You know, convert things into C++ algorithms, and I did that for a few streams, but the Summer got nice and I paused that and have never gotten back to it. But you know, it is on the long list of things that I hope to at some point revisit.

00:13:36 [BT]

Yeah, anyway I, I thought anybody who's willing to take that on is probably willing to to take on, you know, something to do with the array languages. So I did approach you and I asked you if you were interested in doing it and you told me the same thing that I think you had told the the high school students from from Esolang, UM, I'd love to do it. I just have no time. Which is, is is exactly honestly as a person person who's worked as a producer in a number of media, that's exactly what you want to hear because you want the people that have no time to be doing stuff with you because they'll they'll, they'll do it efficiently, but also the reason they have no time is they're so involved with all these other things. They're great connectors. So I thought, OK, well, this and I, i said back to you, don't you? I think you misunderstood what I'm asking for. I'm not asking for you to put a podcast together, I just want you to show up and talk.

00:14:40 [CH]

To which, to which you communicated via e-mail and I said really OK, I can do that.

00:14:46 [BT]

And and and the sound you hear is the steel door slamming shut as Conor gets himself involved in in a in a second podcast. As it turns out, if you listen to his other podcasts, it may have been a third podcast. I'm not sure when the genesis of your third podcast actually came in, whether it,

00:15:04 [CH]

that was much later, that one technically I have a 50 minute 52 second intro episode but no episodes. [10] So it's it's like 2 1/2 podcasts. I don't haven't really started the third one yet.

00:15:15 [BT]

So that was and and and if people are saying, well, what work is there involved in doing a podcast like what that way you get on and you talk. You know that there's not. That's not work and and and as Adám said, and I think Stephen as well said, and I'm sure Conor echoes it this way. This part of it, this part of it does not feel like work. This is actually very enjoyable. It's like talking to friends and that's that's how we want to make it sound, but that's also how it feels, so it's it's it's quite genuine. But in order to do this, there's an awful lot of work that needs to go into it. And before I go into that over to you, Stephen, I think you got something you want to mention.

00:15:57 [ST]

I got a question for Conor actually over the over the years being an array programming enthusiast has sometimes felt like belonging to a secret society. And it's felt felt like this in the way that secret societies are. A bunch of people who know something that most people don't know. And knowing it, we reckon gives us some kind of special powers operating in the world. And when people who've heard of us maybe a little bit, uhm, encounter it, the reaction's often "Wait, you've been doing that since when?", you know, and with you know the array languages that goes back to the 1960s. If you ask the same question of, say, the Freemasons, they'll say, oh, the 17th century. So I'm wondering what Conor's experience was like? How did you, how did you encounter the array languages in the 1st place and what's it been like entering into this one secret society?

00:16:59 [CH]

Well, well, that's that's a long story. The short version of it is that from the years 2014 to 2021, i had heard APL mentions four or five different times, all like every single time i can distinctly remember UM and I actually have two of my three sisters at some point in their careers, worked with either APL or an APL dialect, or a software program written in one of those and then in 2018 I was listening to Functional Geekery. [11] One of another podcast that is probably my favorite podcast of all the podcasts I listened to and they had two or three episodes of people talking about APL, and they were talking about it in sort of a functional context, at which point I was falling in love with Haskell and decided to sort of poke around and found tryapl.org [12] and then very quickly saw the power of the language and like fell in love immediately and I didn't have time to really dig into it, but about half a year later at the uhm, so I guess actually was 2018-2019 'cause when I really started digging into it it was December 2019. In June 2019 was when I first played around with tryapl.org, so that's sort of how I fell into it, and I just immediately fell in love with it. In terms of the secret society, i am, I think it was, i think was, uh, was it Joel Kaplan [13] that we had on or it might have been a different guest that we I had made the remark. You know, some people see the language and they just sort of walked by and their response was just like yeah I just don't understand that how can they walk by.

00:18:54 [BT]

I think that was Steven Apter. [14]

00:18:57 [CH]

Or Steven Apter yeah yeah yeah. They're in two episodes right next to each other, so I sometimes conflate and and both of those if you are joining now or joined a couple episodes ago and haven't listened to those two episodes they're, they're phenomenal, and both of those episodes, i came away with, i mean, Adám mentioned earlier sort of looking forward to this like this is one of the highlights of, I wouldn't say every week 'cause we don't record this every week, but I genuinely really look forward to these recordings. And sometimes have like my mind's been buzzing from the week, the two weeks before and I've just been thinking about things people have said and like want to bring them up. And an example of that was the the rank episode [15] in between sort of rank discussion one and two. I just I've been thinking like on every run you know how come you can do it this way and then to hear Adám say, you know you, could I actually suggested that to Marshall, but for these various reasons it's not a great idea. Yeah, like so it's it's. It's an interesting kind of I think for the listener they're listening to people talk about this, but like for me, I'm learning and in between episodes I hear this stuff. My brain lights up like a Christmas tree, so I wouldn't necessarily say I feel like I'm in a secret society, but i am confused on this language hasn't thrived as much as others. I think there's a similar reason you hear some people try Haskell and they bounce off of it, 'cause it's just for whatever reason it's hard for them to to learn or to pick up quickly. I think APL is somewhat similar. Yeah, but it it definitely it definitely feels like like I when I was on Co recursive, [16] I explained it. I don't think this actually made it into the episode, but there's a YouTube video of us pair programming and the remark happens there. I said, yeah, it's I feel like I've stumbled on this island of treasure and it's just like there's gold lying all over the beaches. It's not even like you have to go look for the treasure. It's just like there, it's just you show up on this island. There's gold everywhere and you can just go pick it up and then you can continue into the island where sure, there's it's a little less obvious where the gold is, but like I think you mentioned once Bob that learning J it's just this continuous, you you know, hole that you go deeper and deeper into and you just continue to learn things about the language and and yeah, it's incredibly incredibly enlightening to learn this paradigm, i constantly as much as I love the language, as I constantly constantly ask myself, like if if I'm potentially crazy, or maybe my brain works in a certain way that just makes the array language suitable for the way my brain works and i constantly ask myself if I'm like if I've fallen into some rabbit hole and I'm not i'm no longer seeing the paradigm for what it is, but anyways, that's a whole other philosophical discussion for a different episode of like, is it that everyone else is missing the beauty? Or is it that a small group of people see the beauty because we have certain special rose tinted eyeglasses on or something like, i really don't think it's the latter. But you can't rule it out as a possibility anyway, so I'll stop stop answering a short question with a long answer.

00:22:17 [BT]

=Well in the Venn diagram of humanity, you did study actuarial sciences, so I think that which could have a minority.

00:22:26 [CH]

That's true, that's true. And the actuaries back in the day, i mean, there was a joke that APL used to stand for the actuarial programming language because of all the domains, actuarial science is one of the best and and that was actually the very first, I mentioned the five times I heard about APL, the very first time I heard about it, i believe, so I said 2014, but that's that was a mistake, it was 20... 2010. I was in my second year of university in my third semester and I took my first actuarial programming course and the Professor Doctor Gary Parker at one point in the course, he said we used to code in this language called APL and I absolutely loved it. It was amazing. You could get so much done. You know the C programmers would be coding something, you know, 2 pages of code and I would write a single liner. Problem is like a lot of people had trouble reading the code. That was the first thing I'd ever heard about aPL is that it's it's extremely powerful. You could do so much with it compared to other languages, but it fell out of favor because of, you know, readability issues. [17]

00:23:30 [AB]

Not sure it was readability issues, maybe typeability issues.

00:23:34 [CH]

Could have been. I mean, I think I think he said that was the problem is that you with some of these programs that were immensely dense. I see that it was harder for people. I think those that spoke APL was a lot easier then. But if you're comparing it to a language like COBOL or something, you know you don't need to necessarily be a COBOL expert to make out what some of the program is doing. At least there's a lot, it's designed for business people. There's a lot of English in that language which it's borrowing from what people already know, whereas APL doesn't really borrow, it borrows a tiny bit, you know, the mathematics, binary operations, and some of the unary operations, but other than that, everything else is is different for a lack of a better word.

00:24:17 [BT]

And I guess to fill in a little background in terms of both Conor and I went to Simon Fraser University and 25 years before Conor took his first classes in in actuarial sciences, I was actually computing science student at SFU and at that time there was a guy named Ted Edwards who, and this is going to sound really bizarre because I was not interested, i I'd learned a little bit of APL at that time, but I I it didn't stick with me. I really wasn't that interested in it. But I dated his daughter. For a couple of years we were, you know, Kim is, so I'm sure still around. I think she's working in Health Sciences somewhere in Minnesota, last time I heard anything but in any case. Uhm, that was my exposure, but I honestly he I would go to his place and he would talk about APL. He would talk about, you know I remember I was taking a course in linear programming and he looked at it and said, why do they do all that work? Why don't they just do this? And like with two characters, he said you could do it this way and it's like I kind of looked down and went. Yeah, no, you're right. 'cause I did a lot of this stuff. I mean to me is just a lot of work. Having learned more about it, I realize there's a reason for that work, and there are things that you can do, the efficiencies and stuff, but the fact is that I was exposed to APL at that time, I even wrote a couple of programs in APL, but it never kicked in. After that it wasn't until I think in the 2000s, and I had a different career and I was working in a different area and my brain just needed different stimulation. And J happened to be free, at least if you were a student. And I always rationalized I was learning it so that made me a student. And and so I got a chance to work with J and a lot of the stuff that I'd learned with APL carried over to J. As ugly as everybody says the language is, which I've never really found it that way, but that's that's a personal preference. But getting back to Conor's story, I think part of that at SFU was that Ted Edwards had taught classes computing classes in APL, using APL as the language, and I believe Perlis did this as well that he would teach a logic course or something like that and he would use APL as the language because it would get the students so much further advanced in what they could do with their programming. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the students were overwhelmed and his courses, although they were excellent that were, were lightly subscribed because there was a lot of people who were just terrified they would wait until it was taught in a different language so that they could get in there without having to learn APL. So I think that sort of carried on through. A few that there was this feeling that this is a language that's powerful, but barely understood because I don't think it ever really got its claws right into the faculty to be able to be used that way, and that may have been the ripples that were still happening in 2010. And I I you know wasn't involved with the university from about 1985 to you know, well, since then. My son graduated this week from SFU so, that's that's the last time that we you know we've had any direct involvement with the Therriault clan, but some so people may correct me and say no. There was a lot of other stuff that was happening with APL at the time, but as I remember it was Ted was the champion in the 80s and was doing a lot of work through the 70s and 80s, mostly in design of chips is how it was being used there then because there was a lot of push to make British Columbia, Mecca of you know, hardware, design and VLSI and all that sort of stuff. But I think at one point we were talking about the work that goes into doing this podcast, and I think it's important to note, especially the work that goes into the transcripts and the show notes, and I'll let Adám talk a little bit about transcripts and show notes. We've both done them, and actually the person who often does most often does the transcripts is Rodrigo, but Adám tell me what goes into doing a transcript.

00:28:37 [AB]

Oh, it's kind of interesting and how much work it actually is. 'cause we all show up for this hour, hour and a half whenever you spend under recording. And then we all go to do our things, and whoever takes on the transcript job. But first we have to wait, obviously, for for Bob to to finish editing and Bob doesn't sleep because, we record this in like what is this? It's early afternoon by you.

00:29:02 [BT]

No no, no no. This is early morning for me. Today I sleep.

00:29:07 [AB]

Oh well, for you personally in the time zone where you live, it's most people consider it early afternoon, right? And and then often by the next morning. So we we are in the middle of the night. We've got a finished editor or almost finished edited and first draft of the episode, and Conor will react with some fire emoji and and and then, assuming that we all are that there are no there are no protests or anything, sometimes like we want to change the cold open or uh, there's some spacing that's off, but usually it's pretty good on the first try. Then somebody, and that's usually Rodrigo, or me, bubbles down sometimes as you said. And originally the first transcript was done by somebody else, right? And we need to give credit where credit is due, if I remember.

00:29:56 [BT]

Yes, it was. Who was it..?

00:30:00 [AB]

Rory Kemp.

00:30:00 [BT]

Rory Kemp OK yeah yeah yeah.

00:30:02 [AB]

He said he would he would do it and offered to do it. And then we we took him up and then he said, yeah, he said that really we should be doing this and and then, so for the next episode it was Richard and Rodrigo. And they came together that they worked on the transcript. And then and then we we started like actually planning for the for the job and Rodrigo said he would do it. Mostly, sometimes he can't do it... And it's a lot of work, it's a so what we do is we we have this Microsoft Office 365 subscription and it's able to transcribe recordings and it does an OK job of the words. It has a very hard time where big sentences begin and end and i so we have like we have this uh, allotment of minutes, month or week or something that we allow to use for transcription without paying further for it. And I think we're just hammering our accounts and Microsoft AI is learning a lot about array programming. It's it's just coming so biased to what what we do because I think it has gotten significantly better. It now knows what what APL is, and the arrays and things like that. It used to totally mangle these abbreviations and things and it now handles rank operators and things like that think really nicely. So it does the first first draft of that, it takes a few minutes to run through it. And then becomes the, starts the editing job, so we're not even typing the words themselves, but it's just where it gets wrong where sentences begin and end, or it gets phrases completely wrong. It gets mixed up and who said what. It does mostly, I I would say 95% it it recognizes correctly who's saying what. And then we go through and and and has to edit this and put these loose sentences that are chopped in the wrong places together and fix grammar issues. And and I think people don't realize how big the differences between spoken language and written language. It's a lot of "ohh" and "ehh" and and strange pauses and people are saying things multiple times. And the computer has no clue. It just writes what we said and that needs to be cleaned up. Otherwise it it's impossible to read. It just doesn't work.

00:32:30 [BT]

As one of the prime offenders you need to complete your thought if you really want the the computer to be able to express what you're trying to say. I often get partway through a thought and I just sort of leave it hanging because I'm letting my mind go off and and that doesn't work well for transcripts and it makes me.

00:32:49 [AB]

Right, so the AI clearly tries to apply some like grammar rules to figure out what people are saying, and then when we change in the middle of a sentence or change tense and things like in the middle, then it goes way off and then again all these technical concepts that we talk about and all these names of functions and adverbs and whatever not we we we strange things we were talking about innovations for things and and it can it can easily take a whole day of of work to go through such a transcript. And like I'll work hours and hours and hours on and then I look at the text editor scroll bar I'm going like "What that's impossible!", how did the scroll bar not move? Yeah, I've done so much already and like I can't even see that I've done anything. And then it has to be done like we record usually on Tuesdays and then we release it by Friday night. The episode just has to be done on time, hopefully. Uh, there's a lot of work. And then there's there's the show notes. And the show notes are usually it's it's easier to say, yeah, we'll put that in the show notes. Then we have to go and actually track down, wait, what what was that strange website that we had in mind? What was that article and somebody will say like the title of a paper or some some talk, and they will say it wrong, or like with the wrong word. And we had to find, wait, did they or or they might conflate two different two separate things into a single thing in their mind, it's just one thing, and which one did it actually mean? How much are we going to include as we have these code examples and we start representing ourselves? Yeah, I do APL and you do J and he does Q and then there's BQN, and then we want to have these code examples in all the different languages and keep them parallel so they're doing exactly the same, and the languages have these slight differences and and all that has to be coordinated and collected together. But it's also fun. It's also, especially if collecting the show notes, I think is a lot of fun.

00:34:48 [BT]

And I I think the show notes are something that really does add to the podcasts in a huge way, and I think I think the way that that it quite often it's it's Adám that does the start on the show notes, and then, sometimes I start them and he finishes them up. We sort of bounce them off each other. But I think the the really neat thing is that we don't try and reduce the show notes. They tend to expand. So if there's a number of different ways it could have been taken, will often include extra stuff in there because a lot of this is if if people aren't familiar with what we're talking about, you're really just trying to get your hooks into the different areas of knowledge and the more chances you get to find out about this stuff, the more sense it starts to make. But I think the show notes are really important and you may find them fun. I I find them I I find it, well like a lot of things in this podcast, I struggle a lot to try and keep up. That seems to be my modus operandi.

00:35:48 [AB]

Dear listener, if you're listening to this through some kind of podcast serving service and not directly through our website, please go over, well, that's perfectly fine, right? But please also visit our website arraycast.com [18] and have a look at our show notes 'cause we put a lot of work into this for you. And you can really gain more out of every episode by looking at those show notes.

00:36:15 [BT]

And the transcripts? Well, I mean, I think the the transcripts.

00:36:18 [AB]

Transcripts are great for finding things. Again, you can search those right? You can't really search an audio track.

00:36:23 [CH]

The show notes are great as well because well, for a plethora of reasons, but the overarching theme is that a lot of this show now it's linked to things that are like very either completely undiscoverable or hard to discover. The three examples that come to mind is just like anything J related.

00:36:42 [AB]

Bob, you gotta work on that wiki man. [19]

00:36:48 [CH]

Uh, because J it's well J is just hard to search for in general because it's a one character language. But also to the the wiki so search that is on J software sometimes can be hard because there's so much content there, a lot of stuff you'll search for it, and then like the result will be a New York J user group because they have notes that talk about that exact thing. The second is just things that like I forget how to navigate to all the time like I think I've mentioned on this podcast, like for the longest time, I could never remember that Stephen Taylor's blog and I I could get this wrong, but I'm almost positive I know it now is www.5jt.com. Is that right? Yeah, and so for for the longest time, I always thought that the

00:37:26 [AB]

(We'll put that in the show notes.) [20]

00:37:29 [CH]

five yeah, the five was somewhere else. And and Stephen has some great blogs. I think one of the latest ones is some solutions to the advent of code and I kept on wanting to go back to that and be like, and, unfortunately, Stephen Taylor also has a very common name, so if you just Google Stephen Taylor, probably our Stephen Taylor is not the first one that pops up. And then the third is, there's certain show notes that get linked to like I think one of them was a translation from J to APL that a user that attended the New York J Users group meeting had just made on his own, and it's like hosted on his own personal site, so like it's on the Internet, but if you search for you know J to Dyalog APL translation, [21] well, like it's, you're never going to get any hits, and so anytime I have to go and find that table like I have it bookmarked now, finally, because it's a super useful table, but I would always have to go back to like the the New York J Users group, try and remember which one that was and then find the link there and so anyways. The show notes are great because a lot of times there are links to things that are either harder to discover just by searching via your favorite search engine, or are basically impossible to stumble across.

00:38:53 [AB]

Another thing I I want to answer that it is, uh, based on the on the transcript length. We say a lot during this hour or whatever it's we usually spend. But often we can link to something where there's a whole lot more in depth and detailed information about whatever concept we might just mention by name or some person we mentioned by name, and I think that's a great benefit. We'll make sure to to link to this episode's show notes.

00:39:18 [CH]

What were you saying, Stephen?

00:39:19 [ST]

I was saying "See? See? We are a secret society".

00:39:24 [AB]

But it's not because we want to be, right? There, yeah, we, i think we do have some customers at Dyalog that don't want their competition to know that they use APL because they think of it as a an advantage, the tool that gives them such an advantage. They don't want the competitors to find out that that's what what makes them so great or something. So we can't mention them by name.

00:39:50 [CH]

There is some, there is some irony of like we are a Fight Club where the first rule of Fight Club is talk about Fight Club. And still for some reason, you know, people don't want to be a part of Fight Club.

00:40:04 [AB]

No, but I think in general the people who, I mean, there, of course there are people who get roped into some position at some company that has some legacy code in APL that's horrible to maintain and they don't want to do APL and they don't understand what's going on. And they of course will have a negative feeling about APL, but other than that, the people who choose to do APL, it's not because it's like an OK thing. They tend to really love what they're doing. And they don't want it to be a close society in general. They're very excited about telling other people things you can do with APL, and then how good, great it is and and well, I'm saying APL, but all these array based, array type languages, UM? But how do we become not closed? And that this podcast can do that, to a certain degree.

00:40:54 [ST]

Oh here's a perfect question for that. If someone says to you, hey Adám, this podcast thing you're doing? What's that about? What episode should I listen to? What would you say?

00:41:05 [AB]

Uh, I think the first one, [22] right wasn't the first one, uh why we love array languages or something?

00:41:12 [BT]

Yeah, you could, you could start at the beginning. You know that's kind of you know.

00:41:17 [AB]

Not because it's the first one, because that's the central question, right? If if, why should I at all be interested in array languages? I definitely shouldn't throw them at dyadic transpose.

00:41:30 [CH]

Yeah, we might not agree on what episode to send people to, but we can all agree that neither of the rank or dyadic transpose episodes [23] are the ones to send people to.

00:41:41 [AB]

We had an internal meeting at that, like right before the recording of this episode, and Morten Kromberg, who's our CTO, and he's been a guest here, right? [24] He's a very long, expert APLer. And so he listened to the to the rank or the leading axis episode. [25] He thought that was heavy stuff so... If an expert APLer thinks that's heavy stuff, I guess, yeah, I don't want to start there.

00:42:12 [ST]

Bob, Conor, where would you send people?

00:42:16 [BT]

OK, OK, there's for for a couple of different things. I think Adám's right with the with the first one. I think that's not a bad place to start, because it's our origin and and it it kind of encompasses a lot of the stuff that we do. In terms of, I actually sent my son to the the Brooke Allen episode [26] because Brooke had such a wild take on getting through all these different hurdles that the industry throws up in front of you. And since my son is just graduating, I said, you know you should listen to this just so you know there's always another way to do something. And he I think he's he's about halfway through it right now. He told me, you know, hops on the elliptical or whatever and listens to it, but that was one that I actually have recommended, but for a specific reason, and honestly, I'm I'm going to say the Steven Apter and the Joel Kaplan were well for one thing, their voices. To me, Steven Apter sounds like Mandy Patinkin and Joel Kaplan sounds a bit like Martin Scorsese and I just love those accents. So they could practically say anything they want and I'm going "This is great". You know the enthusiasm, the intensity and everything is there. But I mean aside from that, obviously they've got great stories and and they're really, really deep thinkers, which also, when you do something conversationally, it's amazing how you can start out something that may be a little bit surface, but if a person is a deep thinker, quite quickly you find out that you do think about things very deeply and that becomes fascinating when I'm when I'm when I'm editing, I'm often looking for those kind of those kind of parts of the the episode to be able to show that angle of people because you often don't, you you would never know it if you just talk to them for five minutes, but talking to them for you know an hour or an hour and a half, which is often the length of time it takes us to record these things, you can get into some really interesting things that most people may or may not know about and and the conversational aspect of it, I think, is is what I really enjoy listening to. You get, you, you're absorbing a lot of information, finding out about a lot of possibilities at the same time, it's just enjoyable to listen to people talk and I'll throw over to Conor and see what what he likes for his episodes.

00:44:51 [CH]

Yeah, I mean so there's two different questions here. It's like, what what episode to send people to, and then like, my favorites. Because I feel like our best episodes are the ones we have guests on. And there's a lot of those that I love. Uhm, so, and probably that would be one of those episodes is the ones, I mean i think the first one is a good candidate, but really I think the the best podcasts for me are the ones that are kind of like storytelling with conversation and questions. Uhm, I was trying to figure it out, i thought it was a talk, but actually while Bob was talking, I googled it. So there's a person in the Clojure community, his name is Russ Olson, and he's been on Cognicast another podcast that focuses on Clojure, [27] and I believe it was episode 138 where he talks about his talk "To the moon" [28] and how storytelling is very important in terms of engaging your audience, which is a topic that I haven't heard anyone else in the tech community talk about, and he does an amazing job, like "To the moon" is an amazing talk and on this podcast he talks about uhm, you know, what what makes it, in his opinion, such a great talk. And it's this storytelling aspect to it. And I think a couple like that we've mentioned now a couple of times. Steven Apter and Joel Kaplan. But there's been other guests that are further in the past that I don't think we think about as regularly anymore, the Eric Iverson episode, i thought, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time listening to that. And like you'll hear me say something in a certain episode where like the guest will be concerned that they're talking, oh, like I'm talking too much. You know I should I should i should stop. And then I'm like "No no no no no", like, "Keep keep going, this is popcorn time for me". Like sure, it's supposed to be, you know, back and forth, but for the first, you know half or whatever 20 minutes the podcast, if they want to tell their sort of origin story where we're learning about, you know, how did they stumble across the language? You know, when it's Eric Iverson, [29] he has a very one of a kind story and access to obviously his father, Ken Iverson. And so yeah, I think those episodes are the ones I would send people to. Basically choose a guest, a guest episode and listen to that. I think yeah, top of mind are the Steven Apter and Joel Kaplan and, I think, those three, Eric Iverson, Steven Apter, and Joel Kaplan for me, off the top of my head, are some of the best storytelling ones. I think Henry Rich [30] also had a really great sort of, you know, as a teacher and his whole perspective but all of the guests, I think, are great episodes to go to, but that's not to say that I don't like the non guest episodes. In fact, some of those are my favorite, but I feel like those lend themselves uhm, less to being great episodes. Like for instance the last two that we recorded on leading axis theory and rank for me. Like I learned so much from that. But I also think I become less of a a good host because I turn into, I'm acquiring knowledge for myself. I'm going to ask the next question in my head so I can answer my own question. Instead of thinking about the listener or the distribution of listeners and where they are on their learning curve and making sure that like oh, we just mentioned a term we have never defined that before because I get so excited about what I'm thinking, and I don't think it's necessarily leads to a bad experience. There's other podcasts that I know definitely have that format, and if I'm not at their level, about 50% of what they're saying i'm understanding, but because they're still so excited about what they're talking about, it's still like a very enjoyable listening experience. And even if I'm not completely soaking in what they're talking about, you know, key words, you know, are being planted in my head that you know a month from now or two months from now or three months from now, I'm going to hear again and remember, Oh yeah, they were talking about this and at some point I'll make the connection. But yes, the point is, lots of episodes are great. I'd probably throw people at the ones where I feel like the storytelling really comes out because of the, because of the guests.

00:48:43 [BT]

Any guesses about what our most popular episode is? One with the most downloads?

00:48:47 [CH]

I actually think I know the answer, but that's only because I have another podcast with access to stats and so I won't answer this. I'll let other folks... And then we also have to get what Stephen's recommendation of first podcast to send people to and favorite.

00:49:05 [BT]

Yeah Stephen, what would you send somebody to? Which which episode?

00:49:09 [ST]

Well, I agree with all of you. The first episode really sets our story, what's our agenda and what we're about. It makes a lot of sense. What you guys have just been saying resonates for me too. The storytelling is really powerful and you get characters not just thinking of people who we've had on recently as guests like Joel and Steven, and particularly Brooke whom you mentioned, and leave a listener with a sense yeah, as you say, here's somebody who thinks very deeply about what they're doing in life, not just in coding. And if you're someone who's interested in coding, you've gotta be interested in like and what's this language these guys use? I've got to take a look at it.

00:49:56 [AB]

I didn't mention which episodes were my favorite ones. I just said which ones i would send send the new listener to. So I'm, personally, what have I most enjoyed participating in, that's probably the tacit discussions. [31]

00:50:10 [CH]

Oh yeah, yeah.

00:50:11 [AB]

That's been absolutely awesome.

00:50:14 [CH]

I mean, that's I think 'cause didn't we get feedback from some listener that said, stop doing this. Stop opining on the...

00:50:22 [AB]

That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy.

00:50:24 [CH]

It's similar on my other podcast is we did a couple Wordle episodes 'cause both me and my co-host love Wordle. And people hated it. But I don't think everyone hated it, but definitely got a few strong opinions coming back, being like, if you don't stop talking about this, I'm I'm quitting listening. To me, i'm just like, OK. I mean, we're just talking about what we like so, don't list. But yes, we got someone saying that tacit was, or I'm not even necessarily sure it was that negative, I i think they just responded after we switched off of tacit, and they said "Finally, a topic of substance" or something like that.

00:50:56 [BT]

Yeah, I think hot, tacit can be kind of a hot button issue amongst people who program the array languages. So there's that aspect of it, but the most popular, the one the episode with the most downloads since we've really been tracking,

00:51:10 [CH]

oh wait, wait, or should we should we let Adám and Adám and Stephen guess? What did they think?

00:51:14 [BT]

We'll let them guess. Go ahead.

00:51:16 [AB]

I have no idea.

00:51:17 [BT]

Well, they don't want to guess.

00:51:18 [CH]

I will guess it is the first episode.

00:51:22 [BT]

No.

00:51:22 [CH]

Really?

00:51:24 [BT]

No. I my my my records aren't that good for up until I think about the memorial we did for for Roger Hui. [34] Past that, so prior to that the the records aren't that good for my my counts, but downloads, the most popular episode, has been Aaron Hsu. [35]

00:51:45 [AB]

Wonder if he did advertisements for to his people about it or something.

00:51:50 [BT]

He may have. Yeah Vanessa McHale [35] is another one who had we had a real uptick when we had her on and she may have had been promoting it as well. Really good episode, i mean I've got no problem telling people to go listen to it 'cause it's a good one. But we certainly saw a big bump when we we did the interview with her, so it's.

00:52:10 [CH]

I wonder if that's a that's a certain amount of bias 'cause I love the conversation with Aaron, but I've actually spoken with Aaron a handful of times or more since you know recording that episode and and so I think it was, it was less of like if it had been the first time I was talking to Aaron, it would definitely would have been registered as higher, but the ones that imprint from this podcast are the ones a lot of the times like it's it's the first time, or second time conversation and usually the first one is more just an introductory, uhm, but yeah, that's true Aaron. I mean, I've watched, I'm not sure all of Aaron's talks, but I've definitely seen a large percentage of them 'cause, whether you agree with all his opinions on the language and style, he's always very, very well spoken and builds a very strong argument for the way he sees the language to be used and and whatnot.

00:53:06 [BT]

Yeah, he tells the story in a different way in the sense that it's it's not often not the type of story you're going to hear around the campfire but it's more of a story based on why he's doing something in particular way, it's almost like listening to a lawyer present a case which is really compelling, but again, I I I kind of thought the Steven Apter and the Joe Kaplan and and the Brooke Allen were more about if I was going to sit around a campfire, those are the guys that I want sitting around the campfire with me, hearing about their, their stories. Another thing that came out of this podcast, and it was actually, I think it was because of the popularity of TryAPL and the fact that J didn't have a way to try out the language as the J playground [36] and the J playground came out because of the J Wiki, I think I got roped into the J Wiki because of the podcast. They, they've never said that officially at J, but I kind of get this feeling that they think I'm sort of hooked out into a wider community and that's why I got pulled into that. And yeah, yeah, it's a good project and and it is hard to find stuff on the J wiki. One little plug output for it is there's actually two areas to search on the J wiki. One is on the upper right and the other is on the sidebar, on the on the left. And the sidebar on the left is actually a search that Chris Burke wrote that you can actually search J terms. The upper left sidebar doesn't give you that option because it's just a generic wiki search, but the one on the sidebar is really useful. Because you can plug in any combination of J phrase and it'll actually pull those out from all the J Wiki, which can be really useful. Other thing we've managed to do with the J Wiki is we've now ported the J essays, [37] that used to be sitting on J software site, so they were really hard to update, they're now on the J Wiki, so that's become easier to update and easier to make current and also to continue to make accurate. So those are two things that we have accomplished with the J wiki. But yes, it's a hard place to navigate, we're going to improve on that, and it's I, I think with this amount of information it will always be a challenge to remember where you saw something. And to that I can say use bookmarks because everybody I've talked to who uses the J Wiki effectively actually bookmarks things in their browser, and that's how they get back to those points. And when I started to do that, I found it a lot easier to find things that I had found before, so it's kind of a curation that you end up doing. But the J playground came out of that directly because of this podcast. I think Adám challenged me to say, well, you should be doing something like that with J and I agreed with him because we should have been, and it was from there that Joe Boegner, Will ???, John Hoff, i'm trying to think of who else has been working on it lately, oh, Chris Burke has been working on it! They developed what had been a dormant way of, you know, using the the web and they actually have now J working on the web. It's not running off a server, it runs off your browser, which has been really powerful, and they just keep expanding it. It's fascinating to use, and we'll put that in the show notes because it's always worth looking at, and we'll also put BQN's and APL's because we've used their ideas as well. So, to be fair, it hasn't only been J doing this on our own. We've definitely cribbed from a lot of other people.

00:56:49 [CH]

Q also, I think, set one, set something similar up, correct Stephen?

00:56:54 [ST]

Set some up?

00:56:55 [CH]

Set something similar up to, I don't think it's necessarily the same as BQN pad, TryAPL and the J playground, but it was, if I recall, on one of the episodes we definitely linked to, hmm, some cloud instance that was basically running Q executables, that you could, basically, I'm not sure if you had to set up an account for it, but you could go... I might be mistaken, maybe it's something else that was...

00:57:18 [ST]

No, you're right, you're right, there was something we had running at Kx for a while, learn.kx.com, we've run, which, if I'm remembering right, it gave you Python, Jupyter notebooks in which you could execute, execute Q expressions.

00:57:37 [CH]

Yeah, I just went to that right now. learn.kx.com [38] and it does look like you need to input some information, but yeah, once you do that, I'm pretty sure you have access to a cloud instance, or yeah Jupyter notebook instance that, slightly different than the J playground that was just mentioned, but similar in that you can sort of test stuff out online, which I think is a great, a great way, if you're just thinking about getting started with these languages, you don't have to go and download anything per say, you can just go to some website, type a few things and...

00:58:12 [ST]

Bob's story about the bookmarking reminds me that that was a a key part of Iverson's pedagogical method. Did I pronounce that right? Pedagogical? In the late 70s he developed a, what he called a working introduction to APL. He thought this was how APL should be taught and in, back in those days it was mostly being taught to people who've got no prior programming experience, so there was not so much to unlearn and let go of in order to get to grips with array programming. And one of the first things an instructor had to do for this course was get students to start bookmarking pages, sticky notes or post-it notes or whatever, in the reference. Something which I learned and stayed with me pretty much the rest of my working life. When i'm learning a new language or a new topic, get hold of the reference and start finding my way around it. Even though I can't understand most of it to start with. So I see something in my tutorial or whatever, get the reference, look it up. Don't understand much of this stuff, put a sticky note in or whatever and keep coming back to it as it makes sense. And then as you go as I go, I wind up with some solid and secure knowledge about the language. Rather than what whoever has written the dummies guide thinks I need to know.

00:59:38 [CH]

Alright, we are, I think past the hour mark. How do we want to wrap up our annual review or slightly post annual review? 'cause what do we keep episode numbers? What episode is it already?

00:59:49 [BT]

I think this is episode thirty.

00:59:50 [CH]

So 30? Yeah. Episode 26...

00:59:54 [BT]

Which I think was with Steven apter.

00:59:56 [CH]

How do we end this? Is there one final question? One final statement? I'll throw it to you, Bob. Put you under the the executive producer or. Adám put his hand up, Adám.

01:00:07 [ST]

What do we want for the next year?

01:00:09 [BT]

I will, that is exactly what, you nailed it. That's exactly what I was going to do. Yeah yeah.

01:00:13 [AB]

Yeah exactly, I would I. Would love to hear back from the listeners. And so you've been enjoying the content or which kind of content? Or should we be looking at..?

01:00:22 [CH]

Minus the tacit episodes.

01:00:25 [AB]

I would love to hear from anybody who has been enjoying those. I was just curious. If you're out there, my friend, please let us know.

01:00:33 [CH]

Yeah, we'd like feedback specifically on the tacit episodes, and specifically only if it's positive.

01:00:40 [BT]

I think I think we'll take everybody's feedback and, as long as they understand that part of the the effort that goes into putting the podcast together and all the people that work on it, you actually don't have a direct influence on the direction we take. Although in influence is probably a better way to think. You can influence the direction we take, but don't think that you can tell us what to do because i don't think that would work very well. Don't be frustrated if we don't take your suggestion. There have been many suggestions that we haven't had a chance to implement yet. That doesn't mean we won't, because they're good suggestions, but you know, every two weeks we've had a lot number of guests, we've got other guests that we are looking forward to having on, and in the next year, and I'm sure there are other topics I know of other topics that we could spend spend an hour talking about that are fairly important to the people that program in the array languages so... So that's what I kind of see happening in the year ahead. I guess more of the same, but I but you don't know which direction it's going to take, so that's what makes it interesting as well.

01:01:47 [CH]

I would also add if there's listeners out there that either themselves or happen to know people that might be interested in coming on. We're always looking for different voices. I think, you know, a great episode that was, Vanessa McHale was because she didn't program just in an array language, she also had, you know, I guess Futhark is an array language, and that would definitely, I think, be considered an esolang, or definitely like a less well known language. But she also, uh, day-to-day was programming in Haskell, so if you're out there and you're doing some side projects or have some story to tell with array languages but aren't necessarily, you know a full blown you know array language developer, or, you know someone like that that has a different perspective or something? We're definitely looking for different stories and different perspectives about about these languages, and I, I think definitely, you know, so far, our guest list has been people that are have been, you know, storied careers over the decades. Which are, is an amazing, you know conversation and story to be told, but I I think you know in the future we have this Esolang conf that just got set up and they are a bunch of high school students, I think would be awesome to bring on, you know, a couple of the high school students you know. One of them is, i think specifically designated as the APL lead. If they were interested in coming on, even you know one or two of them, I think would be interesting to have conversations with, you know, younger folks that are, you know, still learning or still in school. So if you happen to know of people like that or you are a listener yourself in that situation, feel free to you know send us an e-mail at and I'll throw it to Bob, 'cause I always mess up the e-mail.

01:03:28 [BT]

What, what is it contact at arraycast dot com, [39] I think. I should check that. Haven't haven't said it often enough and, but I believe it's contact at arraycast.com and that will be a way, and we'll put that in the show notes, we're going to keep driving people back to the show notes.

01:03:46 [CH]

The first link in our show notes will be a recursive link to the show notes for this episode, so you can just keep clicking that over and over again.

01:03:52 [AB]

Will we also put the URL to our website in the show notes.

01:03:58 [BT]

Yes. You mentioned it earlier, that will be in the, that will be in the show notes. That will be a meta show note.

01:04:05 [AB]

Of course I I would like to actually to hear some young, at least of heart, person come in and speak about the other side, right? We very much see it from the side of the people who already know array programming, and they're trying to get the message out there and they're trying to create all these materials and all these avenues to get into it, but what does that landscape look like from the other side of somebody who has no idea about these things and stumbles on it, or whatever way they get into it. Like for example, at times the the APL orchard chat room [40] is very active and I, my feeling is that people sometimes, like, even chat isn't even really very well known. The whole feature on on stack exchange. And then people might go and browse the list of active chat rooms, and then sometimes they might see this chat room is really, really busy right now, and then they drop in. And I see this new profile picture and name and I'll quickly go "hello there so and so you're interested in APL?". And they go like, "what's APL?" and then say, well, you know, let's go! And some of them become APLers after this, right? And so what does that look like? What is that experience and and that might also identify some of our weak points. What is it that we should focus more on?

01:05:31 [CH]

Yeah, while you were saying that I was thinking, I'm not i'm not sure if we would ever really pull the trigger on this, but it would be interesting to bring on some like people that aren't big fans that you know programmed in it for a few years. I actually do know someone that attends one of my meetups regularly. And that has coded in APL for a number of years, but never really was a big fan... And that's, the thing is, there's a number of podcasts that I listen to, I'll i'll throw this one out there because they're never going to listen to this. It's called the Strength running podcast, and they're always every single guest they ever bring on. They're always talking about, so you know, you know, what do you think about strength? Is that important? And they're always like, regardless of what the person is saying, they're always going to bring up strength training and how that's the most important thing and I'm like we get it, we get it. It's the strength running podcast. The only way you can be a good runner is to do strength training in the gym. There's no alternative option. I think there was one guest that actually said, uh, you know, you'd take it or leave it, and then he was like, well, well I'd have to disagree, and I was like, well I wonder why that is? But so it could be interesting to bring on some folks that you know, I wouldn't want to be combative, but just, you know, share their experience and why you know they they came to the language and and never really developed a fondness for it. And I think that could you know like Adám, just said, lead to, you know, if it turns out that the lack of fondness is because it's just a hard language to learn, they didn't know where to go to learning resources or what, and I think you know that story is changing with the APL wiki and the the work that's being done on the J software website, etc.

01:07:00 [AB]

I mean that kind of feedback is really great. There there are huge things that have come out directly from negative feedback like that. I know TryAPL was set up because somebody who was participating in the in the Dyalog APL problem solving competition said like there's a "try this language.org" and "try that language.org" and no tryapl.org. And then they made it, and APL wiki [41] was definitely born of the frustration of people can't find information about APL and array programming. They can find reference documentation, but that's not the same thing. And same thing with APLcart, [42] was set up because people have all these how to questions and they couldn't, there was no where to go with that. So we want the feedback, right? We want this, say this is what we're missing. This was what was really difficult. This is where I got stuck again and again.

01:07:53 [CH]

It seems like the folks in the array language community are so in love with their languages that if you complain about something that is fixable, it will be fixed very quickly. Or created very quickly, which is awesome.

01:08:05 [AB]

That's why we're happy doing array programming right?

01:08:13 [BT]

And with that...

01:08:15 [CH]

We'll say...

01:08:17 [BT]

Happy Array Programming!