aplette

This is a new take on an old language: APL. The goal is to pare APL down to its elegant essence. This version of APL is oriented toward scripting within a Unix-style computing environment.

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5Distinct people

9Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

88GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

This is a new take on an old language: APL. The goal is to pare APL down to its elegant essence. This version of APL is oriented toward scripting within a Unix-style computing environment.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

If you're interested in recent developments in array languages, I recommend checking out: BQN https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/ ngn/k…

kick used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-05-29 04:06:24 UTC to 2023-03-05 07:51:37 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	4	1
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

shrubble·Jun 10, 2021

There is Aplette which supposedly integrates nicely with other Unix tools. It's a port/update of the earlier openAPL source code, which I think was done by Ken Thompson? Here: https://github.com/gregfjohnson/aplette

In Try APL

kick·Feb 4, 2021Recommendation phrase

If you're interested in recent developments in array languages, I recommend checking out: BQN https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/ ngn/k https://git.sr.ht/~ngn/k/tree/master/item/readme.txt (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22009241) aplette, which is a modernization of Ken Thompson's APL (with a LOT of projects in between them; Ken's APL interpreter -> ? -> OpenAPL -> aplette) https://github.com/gregfjohnson/aplette (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740536) I'd also recommend checking out J, which isn't a recent development, but has the best syntax out of all array languages, has the best development environments, is the easiest to learn (it has a way to learn it built into the language itself!), and is the only one that treats making GUIs as a first-class feature (and, also, critically, is

Read the rest

not proprietary, unlike Dyalog): https://jsoftware.com (Has so many previous discussions I just recommend using HN search to find them.) The chat is biased in favor of Dyalog APL, but a lot of the modern additions Dyalog has made to the language make it (in my opinion) worse as a notation, so ideally don't let it turn you off of the concept of array languages entirely if Dyalog doesn't "click" with you. If you haven't already, you should also check out Notation as a Tool of Thought, a paper so good it won Iverson the Turing Award: https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...

In The APL Orchard