Transcript

Transcript prepared by

Bob Therriault

Show Notes

Conor Hoekstra

00:00-00:06

Well, like I said, it's been like two months since we've recorded and there's no editing. So if I didn't, this is episode 118.

Music

00:06-00:18

Conor Hoekstra

00:18-00:46

Welcome to ArrayCast. I'm your host, Conor. And today with us, we have our four regular recurring panelists. And we've got a very interesting slash exciting slash some other adjective topic to chat about today. So So we're going to see where this conversation goes. We'll get to a very big announcement. But before we do that, we're going to go around and do brief introductions. We'll start with Bob, then go to Stephen, then to Marshall and finish with Adám.

Bob Therriault

00:46-00:50

HI, I'm Bob Therriault, and this is my last ArrayCast.

Stephen Taylor

00:52-01:01

I'm Stephen Taylor. This is my last ArrayCast, at least for a while. I've been an APL and q enthusiast. I still am.

Marshall Lochbaum

01:05-01:12

I'm Marshall Lochbaum. I started out with J. I worked at Dyalog for a while. I did BQN. I was on some podcasts, mostly just one, and this is my last episode.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:15-01:23

I'm Adám Brudzewsky. Hi. I started with APL early on. I'm still doing APL. I started with ArrayCast early on, from the beginning, and I'm still doing ArrayCast.

Conor Hoekstra

01:25-02:22

Oh, was that clear? Was that clear for the listener? [01] To be very clear, as I mentioned before, as I usually say, my name's Conor, host of ArrayCast and massive enthusiast and fan of all the Array languages. You heard from Bob, Stephen, and Marshall that this is their last ArrayCast Was it clear that this is not Adám's last ArrayCast? If it wasn't, I will repeat that it was not. So it is also not my last ArrayCast. So two of the, I guess, five, if you call me a host and the other four panelists, will be continuing on in some form. And I think that's what takes us to the announcement is that this is... I guess the end of a chapter. I'm not sure if era is, uh, we can call this an era. It was what, four, four years plus, uh, but I'll throw it over to Bob and, uh, I think he's going to kick this off and then we're going to have a little bit of a different episode for the next, uh, 60 minutes or 90 minutes, depending on how long this goes. So over to you, Bob.

Bob Therriault

02:23-03:50

Well, and before you tune us out because you're not interested in the craziness that goes on with producing podcasts, we probably will get back to talking about array languages because we do have other topics that we were going to discuss as a group, which should be of interest for people who are more interested in languages than this podcast. which I think is a fair number of people. But one thing I'd like to make clear is the changes to this. There's nothing acrimonious about this at all. Like nobody's upset, nobody got kicked off or any of those kind of things. We're all still friends. And, you know, that's sometimes these things happen. happen in acrimonious ways, that's not the case here. And thankfully, well, I was the one who decided I wasn't going to be doing ArrayCast anymore for a variety of reasons, which I guess if everybody's interested, I'll get into a little bit. But when I said that, then... Stephen and Marshall said, you know what, we've sort of come to the end of our run too. But thankfully, Conor and Adám decided to continue on, which I think is great. And when I gave my announcement, I said, I really hope this isn't the end of the podcast, but it is the end of the podcast for me. So with that, I guess I, you know, my usually wordy way of doing things. Are there any questions about the reasons I have to to decide not to do this anymore?

Conor Hoekstra

03:51-04:12

I mean, I can ask on behalf of the listener, because you said you were happy to share if people are curious. And if I were a listener, which honestly I am, I do listen to these after we record them, I would be very interested to know what led you to this decision and share as much as you feel comfortable sharing, obviously. And then maybe we can hear the same from Stephen and Marshall.

Bob Therriault

04:13-07:40

Yeah, I won't. I mean, I probably will end up drawing it out. I don't plan to draw this out into large detail and stuff. But there are points in your life that you look at what you're doing, and you say, so what am I working towards? What am I contributing to? What am I doing? And For whatever reason, and I guess it's kind of just a dis-ease with the current state of the world, I look at what I'm contributing to and I'm taking a hard look at that and deciding that, and I think for a long time I thought... the things like the array languages, because they were a little niche, might be kind of a solution to some of these issues because they were accessible and they required thought. And so they encouraged people who were willing to put effort into learning something to be involved. And I thought this... I don't know whether I thought this consciously, but I thought people who are going to do that kind of work are more likely to be thoughtful about how they use it. And then the world happened. And lately what I've been seeing is it really doesn't matter how careful we are with these tools today. There are people who use these tools in really nasty ways. And that's not on the array languages. That's on the way the world is set up. And right now I'm taking a hard look at how the world is set up. And I'm part of that world. I'm not saying, oh, what have you guys done to this? I'm part of that world. And that's actually one of the most difficult things. It's trying to come to terms in my own head with how much... this whole way of looking at the world has shaped me. And it's a real struggle to try and get, you know, if I was a fish, it's a struggle to get out of the water. And, and that's, that's the challenge I'm facing when I, sort of came to these, I won't say a midlife crisis, because I'm well past that. But I think there are aspects of it that sound like a late life crisis. It's not a crisis. But it's just an opportunity to learn more about myself and the way I look and the things I care about and the things I contribute to. And that's where I hit my line. It wasn't the work that a podcast takes. Although if you're thinking of doing a podcast, podcasts do take a lot of work. Conor can attest to this. Adám can attest to this. And I was happy to do the work. I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed the whole process. I enjoyed the listener feedback we got. That was awesome. I enjoyed the guests we got on. I enjoyed the, well, I've told people, But... this is like having a coffee break with a bunch of friends and then recording it and playing it back. And that's really what it is. And I really hope that we're able to, from time to time, sort of come back and not talk on the air, not talk on the ArrayCast. This really is my last ArrayCast. But I'm happy to, I want to continue the friendships. I think they're super good people that I've met in this process. But as I said, the world is veering off in a way that I think there's more work to be done. And that's where I am right now.

Conor Hoekstra

07:44-07:47

I'm pausing here. I'm hoping to see if anyone else has a follow-up question.

Bob Therriault

07:47-09:06

The other thing I should say is I'm not doing any cleanup on this episode. So if you notice there's more pauses or breaks or things like that, I have told the panelists, we will take out stuff that's not appropriate. So in other words, if somebody slips up and says something, they just don't want on, we will clean that up. But otherwise you're hearing it as it's recorded. And normally what I would do is take out breaks and, and honestly, the reason I do that is not to edit meaning, but it, What I found as a listener is if I shorten things up, it actually helps the flow. And a lot of the times it's counterintuitive. But if I have somebody make a quick explanation and I make it quicker, it's easier to understand because you can feel the flow of the content. You understand it. Whereas if you leave all the breaks in, the ums and the ahs and the stops and the starts, you know, it's like you're trying to follow three threads at once. It's really hard to follow sometimes. That didn't happen with every guest, but there were some guests that had really cool things to say, and I was able to condense them a bit, retain the meaning, and it was easier to understand them than it would have been if we just played it without that. But that wasn't the reason I stopped. It wasn't the work.

Conor Hoekstra

09:11-09:14

All right, Adám, I did right when you were asking your question, I cut you off to say I was waiting for someone to ask. So go ahead.

Adám Brudzewsky

09:14-09:37

Oh, it's fine. It also means the listeners can can see how much we actually speak on top of each other and interrupt each other, everything that Bob used to clean up. Well, I was just curious whether... But whether you've experienced anyone actually using array languages for, or maybe not nefarious purposes, but things that were disagreeable to you.

Bob Therriault

09:39-11:16

No, not specific. I can't say anything I saw that people were doing languages that way. But I mean, I looked at the tool, right? The power in that tool, the power in that expression. And I also look at how people are using technology and basing it on a worldview that I think obviously when we look around us is destructive to the planet, to the world we live in. And it doesn't seem to be stopping. And I think that's the thing that kicked me off. The array languages per se, no. They're the same as the fish trying to get out of the water. You can't take them out of that technology. There will be people who are using them for bad purposes. And I'm not saying people who are creating tools or applications with them. Because honestly, my perception is that usually is not the problem. The problem is the people who are getting these people to do this stuff... have a real warped view of, of how the planet works and how interrelationships between people work. And as a result, they've been given power. They probably should never have been given. And, uh, the array languages are part of that, but no, there was, I didn't see somebody saying, you know, I'm, this guy's, you know, cracking nuclear codes or something like that. There's, there's nothing, uh, you know nothing like that

Adám Brudzewsky

11:16-11:33

it reminds me of what Douglas Crockford put in the JSON license the software shall be used for good not evil and if I remember right IBM's lawyers wrote to him and asked for a separate licensing agreement with him to also use it for evil and that was...

Bob Therriault

11:34-11:38

There was Google's you know thing don't be evil

Adám Brudzewsky

11:39-11:41

but they stopped doing that

Bob Therriault

11:41-11:44

they did stop doing that yeah exactly...

Adám Brudzewsky

11:44-11:52

but I think IBM IBM explained that as far as I know they don't do anything evil themselves but they cannot guarantee that their customers don't use things for evil.

Bob Therriault

11:53-11:57

Oh, do they? Well, talk to the people in the Second World War about that.

Adám Brudzewsky

11:57-12:11

Okay, not anymore. Okay, okay. Yes, yeah, I know the Germans used IBM machines to keep track of genocide. So, yes.

Bob Therriault

12:12-12:12

Yeah, I mean...

Adám Brudzewsky

12:12-12:36

But isn't this... no you go ahead but isn't this the same as pretty much any tool like should we not have knives at home because people or should we stop making knives because some people use knives for bad purposes or hammers or houses

Bob Therriault

12:38-13:06

um that's a really good question and that's that honestly that's one that is one of the trying to the fish trying to get out of the water that I wrestle with because um you're right we are surrounded look what we're doing right now we could not do this except for technology so it wouldn't exist except for technology um And that's just a given as my wife makes my printer run.

Adám Brudzewsky

13:06-14:49

But you couldn't do anything without the technology. I mean, maybe I shouldn't pull religion into this, but it's a bit of a special episode. So you stop me if it gets all inappropriate. So it's probably known to many of the listeners that I'm an Orthodox Jew. And before we Orthodox Jews take benefit of things, generally with eating, drinking, smelling and so on, and we say a blessing, blessing is a pretty meaningless word in English, but it's sort of a thanks or a recognition. And what I like to have in mind is... And everything that had to come together for me to, for example, have this apple, right? I take a bite of an apple. But before that, pretty much everyone, there are some people on some islands southeast of India that weren't involved, but pretty much everybody else in the world was indirectly or directly involved in getting me this apple so I could take a bite of it. Because I bought this apple over at the supermarket, right? Now, obviously, it wasn't produced in the supermarket. It came there with some delivery driver who was only able to do the delivery because somebody took care of his kids while he's doing the delivery. And somebody had to pave the roads, too. And then the people working at the supermarket, including the people who built the building that the supermarket is in, you can see how this explodes. And very quickly, everybody in the world was involved. So you said the fish out of the water, you can't do anything without it involving everyone, both good people and bad people. We're all in this together.

Bob Therriault

14:52-16:18

You're absolutely right. And I think if more of the people in the world had that approach, I think particularly the gratitude, you call a blessing, but the gratitude for... The gift that you're given over and over again, a daily basis, every instant things happen that you should be grateful for. I think if that were the pervasive attitude on the planet, we'd be in a very different space right now. Because it actually extends beyond... human society. It includes the world that we live on. It includes the animals, the plants. It includes all of that. We are all part of that. And that's a point of view that I am not seeing society take anymore. I'm seeing society take a point of view that says, you know what? Maybe 1.5 degrees Celsius isn't that important. [02] Maybe we can go to 2. Well, what are you saying then? You're saying, well, screw the rest of you. It's just a number. You've completely separated yourself from the rest of the planet as a human being. That isn't healthy for you. It's not healthy for everybody else. But the description of your faith and the way you approach it is much closer to what I think is a sane approach. to technology. I don't see that happening right now. And that's my concern.

Adám Brudzewsky

16:19-16:20

Me being called sane, that's okay.

Bob Therriault

16:21-17:28

Well, you know what, there's a certain amount that anything you say, like, this is such a structure, and I think Stephen can back me up, it's often referred to as modernity. It's such a structure that's been built up over literally thousands of years and it's subsumed other cultures. So there were other cultures that were closer to what you're describing and they've been sucked into this huge, powerful, because it provides all these things, it's turned into kind of a consumerist approach. And that thing has taken on everything else. And it's trying to separate itself from reality. As a result, it has created its own reality. And so if you say something against that, and there's people who'll be listening to this right now saying, you know what? He lost his mind. That's what happened. He lost his mind. He's not doing the podcast anymore. But the point is, is anybody who questions that now would be saying, well, you're crazy, the rest of us aren't crazy. But a sane person in an insane world will be called insane. Yeah. The world will say you're insane, right? Because they don't, the reality is different.

Adám Brudzewsky

17:29-18:49

Yeah. Well, I mean, this for me gives me a lot of respect to everything in the world around me and hesitance to destroy. For me, it is not an obvious thing to smack a mosquito. Yeah. You have to weigh that before and against first because it's also just a creature. That's just doing its thing. And maybe even more religion pulled into this. Again, you can stop me if it's too much. And it's something that's, I think, quite unknown about Judaism. But Judaism has the, or at least the mysticist part of Judaism, has a concept of reincarnation, even between different life forms, possibly even between things that we wouldn't consider alive. So when we have at our table at home a fly that's annoyingly trying to sit down and take a bite of what we're eating, I tend to tell my children that maybe this is a reincarnation of a person. who did everything right except he was so busy with doing everything right it never took the time to really appreciate food and so he was reincarnated into a fly that gets to live for a very short time just to complete that last missing piece of showing proper appreciation for the food it's

Bob Therriault

18:49-18:55

I love that story that's great.

Adám Brudzewsky

18:56-19:31

obviously I don't know if that's the case with the fly but they're still giving this kind of respect so I mean I respect you for the decisions you make and obviously I'm not going to try to force you to remain or even convince you to remain here I'd like to explain why I want to keep going even though I definitely recognize some of the fortunate actions and consequences that are being that have evolved especially in the tech world for sure. And I'm very much against a lot of what the tech world is doing.

Bob Therriault

19:33-19:39

There's a lot of people who the question is whether I can work within the system to make the system better or whether I have to step out of the system.

Adám Brudzewsky

19:40-19:41

But you can't step out of the system.

Bob Therriault

19:41-20:32

That's the thing. You're right. You can't. But while I was traveling around Scotland and with my wife and walking around and stuff, Stephen had – and I made this – I told the group that this was going to be my last ArrayCast, my last producing the ArrayCasts. Stephen said, you might want to look at this book. And he suggested if you're if you're doing reading, and it's called Hospicing Modernity. And essentially, the book is about saying, modernity is On its last legs, it doesn't look like it to modernity, it doesn't know it yet, but it's not going to be able to go much longer the way it is because it's acting like an adolescent, it's not acting like a mature entity, and it's got to the point where it's cycling now.

Adám Brudzewsky

20:33-20:37

But what the modernity means is this super consumption of resources.

Bob Therriault

20:38-24:03

Yeah. You're not thinking about, you're not taking the time to express gratitude. You're not thinking about, you're thinking about what you can get. You're thinking about, you know, what could this do? I could do this. You know, and you're not, you're, you're, if you look at sort of, you know, mature societies, there's always an aspect of the brakes going on in the society. Somebody's going to say, you know what, we should think about this first. And that's usually represented by older people and younger people usually push against that because they're exploring and everything. But if the balance is there, the bad stuff, the really dangerous stuff may not happen because it's got brakes. You've got a FerrarI, but you've got brakes on it. So you make it around the corner. You don't go off the edge. Um, and I think that's, that, uh, introspection is something that's not happening as much in the society anymore. Um, and I think that's, that's the risk. I don't think you're, I absolutely agree that you can't get out of it. I can't get out of it, but what I can do is I can look for ways to, as it slides off and maybe something else approaches it, can we make the thing that replaces it, can we make that learn from the lessons that it's teaching us right now? Because in spite of all the nasty things that I see happening, it's teaching us a tremendous amount of really hard lessons about how, how people are, how humanity is. Well, maybe I shouldn't say that. How modernity has shaped people, because I don't know whether people are that way to begin with. Most of the people I meet aren't so much that way. They kind of, and I've included in this, I'm a people. They've fallen into this trap of looking at the world that way. And you get the benefits of all the... all the inventions, all the work. And it's not just like people who live on the planet now. I was sitting in an airport looking at this huge plate window that had to be 10 feet by 20 feet. And I was looking at it thinking, What does it take to make a piece of glass that perfect, that large, and then put it in place inside this building? I mean, that isn't just the people that are on the planet now. wow. That goes back to the Industrial Revolution. That goes back all that time. We all get the benefit of those things. The problem is we're not acting like that. We're saying, yeah, that's ours. Of course I've got an airplane terminal. Right. We built that. That's ours. We can do that. Well, what was the cost of building the airplane terminal? What happened to the environment as a result of that? What happens when you're flying in and out of that? If you're not thinking about those things at all, you're insulated from the actual life of the planet. You might not know it, but you're insulated from it. Whereas the step is to try and go back into it, understand that you are part of that life of the planet, not the construct that's the modern world, But the actual life of the planet, we are part of. And I'm not trying to get out of that. I mean, we all know there's a way out of that. I'm not trying to do that.

Adám Brudzewsky

24:04-24:46

I'm happy to hear that. Yeah. But there's even that acknowledgement of mortality. Yeah. I think people are very afraid of their mortality these days. And I've even had people, friends coming over and being sort of shook by... by me speaking about my own mortality. It's like a taboo subject these days. You don't speak about that, but yeah, I'll be here for at most 120 years and I've definitely spent a third or more of that. In the context of all of human history, well, obviously I can't do much for the people who have already lived, for the people who will live, what is my fair share of everything in comparison to all the other people have to live all the other years in the future? We should conserve a little bit.

Bob Therriault

24:49-25:29

Yeah, definitely thinking about future generations for sure. But the other thing that when you think about other generations, and walking around Scotland, walking around castles and stuff, we live like kings like literally the kings of you know the 1100s 1200s didn't have anywhere near the quality of life we have not even close not even day to day you know it wasn't even close I mean we have servants they just happen to be tech and Stephen's got his pen up I want to hear what Stephen has to say

Stephen Taylor

25:33-29:07

yeah Last time I was in New York a few years ago I heard a question Why New Yorkers build tunnels And it turns out that New Yorkers build tunnels So no one can see them going to New Jersey And on that trip, after I got saturated with the joys of New Jersey, I discovered I could take a train over to the Pacific Coast and come and visit you. Yeah And it's been one of my greatest pleasures in working on this podcast is getting to hang out with you and on this particular trip. came to visit the most beautiful environment in which you live in British Columbia. And we went together to visit old growth forest, something which I wanted for a long time to build. to visit. [03] A Canadian forester had told me some years ago that when you walk into an ecosystem which has matured over the centuries, you could feel the intelligence. And I wanted to walk in and you took us to a place where we could do that. And bless you, you also took me to visit one of my heroes, the environmental activist and poet and scholar, Robert Bringhurst. So I've got to appreciate deeply the step you're taking to commit more strongly to a postmodern, a postmodernity future and to work on that. I'm hoping that we can continue to work together on that. It's a large part of my community work here in London. I've taken your departure to step down myself, not for the same reasons, but... We've been going something like, was it about four years doing the ArrayCast? And I'd heard years ago that if you ever get offered a newspaper column, you should stop after three or four years. At the beginning, one feels... I've got so much to say and new ideas keep coming and so forth. But after our time on the ArrayCast, I feel largely that I've said things I had to say probably twice. And my plate is more than full here with work to do. It's time to step back. However, if there's something real interesting coming up on APL, I'd be open to contributing my old war stories again. Yeah. I was saying as we were warming up for the episode, I'd be really interested to hear four years into this. whether our views on the array languages or perhaps how they have changed after four years of doing this podcast and listening to each other, it would seem to me a complete tragedy and waste of time if nothing had changed.

Marshall Lochbaum

29:12-31:11

well maybe I should tack on first and give a give a little reasoning I don't have uh anything nearly as dramatic uh I mean it's it's really just I've never been much of a podcast person so you know I tell people I have this podcast and they say 'What you have a podcast?' um and I mean yeah I just have a preference for you know written material um So I've also been doing this new Quote Squad every week. But yeah, I mean, I thought this was enough for me and this is a good opportunity to step down. As for the how my thoughts have changed... Well, I was, as an array programming native, my thoughts on array languages mostly change when I'm forced to work with non-array languages. So that's, I find all that I've been taking for granted. And I guess the biggest factor that... that I've really noticed more as time comes on is how important immutable data is to array languages. And the immutable arrays, and that's what really sets apart, like, we've talked a lot about, you know, what languages are Iversonian and non-Iversonian. And I found that you can... So actually, maybe every single case that I know of, you can separate them by saying, well, do they have-- or at least array-oriented languages. Are the arrays immutable or not? So NumPy, the arrays are mutable. It's not Iversonian. What the Lil John Earnest projects, the arrays are immutable. Well, it's Iversonian. And that just cuts it right. And R is like almost Iversonian, and it's a razor kind of almost immutable. So perfect. So I think that's just as a programming concept, that's risen to be very important in my mind.

Conor Hoekstra

31:15-31:20

Bob, Adám who wants to tackle whether their views have changed or not over the course of this podcast

Bob Therriault

31:23-34:04

well actually for me um my views have changed but in an interesting way that's sort of not tied up so much with the array languages but with the way that what I was hoping to accomplish with the podcast, I guess. And originally I was thinking this would be a way to popularize the array languages. But over time, what I realized was that the array languages have their own barrier to entry, which is a different way of thinking. And that's a barrier that actually tends to be higher for people who already understand computers than it is for computers. people who might come on at a more naive level that they'll understand the concept quite quickly because it's not hard to grasp unless you've already been conditioned into thinking about things as sequences of events as opposed to objects that would be, you know, functional languages that can make it easier. The original idea was to try and popularize, to make it more available, and as an aside, to open up a communication medium within the language. That evaporated, I would say, within the first six months. I realized this is more about a communication medium within people who study array languages. And I think that's one of the things that I found most gratifying about it. We started to interview people who talked about listening to the podcast and doing things. which to me, it's a communication medium that maybe didn't exist before and has opened up a new way of doing things. Not to say it's the only way, because there are obviously things like Vector and the different journals have been able to do that as well. But this podcast did it as well. So that's one thing that changed for me. I went from saying popularizing to everybody to say, actually, let's just focus on communicating within the community so people know more about it. And I think the Iverson College that we did last year showed that the differences in the people that came together and looked at things from different perspectives was so cool. And I think that happened as a result of this podcast, because I don't know whether Stephen would have done another one. I mean, he might have, but I know on the podcast at one point when we weren't recording, he said, what do you think if I did one? And we all said, yes, do one. We were emphatic about that. And so I think that growth of community, the contribution to that, that's a difference I've seen in that time. Yeah.

Conor Hoekstra:

34:08-34:10

You're up Adám

Adám Brudzewsky

34:11-36:54

yeah I don't think I think my views have changed much I've just learned a lot maybe that also changes my views which is like I've gotten some better understanding of other array languages. I think I've even gotten some better understanding of APL as we go along and discuss things. I appreciate that. I definitely came to this with the goal of... and spreading knowledge about array languages and APL in particular. And my feeling over these years has been that there has been an increase of awareness around array languages and APL. part of a larger shift from the period when, especially APL had a really bad name. When I first came to Dyalog, it was about a decade ago, then it was like the... APL was a little bit considered still a bad word. It wasn't maybe as bad as it had been before. But if you look back, you're probably looking like a way back machine. There was a while when Dyalog avoided the word APL everywhere. The language was Dyalog. And you have to dig into the website to find somewhere where it's built on an APL core or inspired by APL or something like that. And I think that has changed. Definitely there are people who criticize and rightfully area languages and APL in particular. APL has the most ugly words and weird stuff of all the area languages being old. but I think there's a lot of Yeah. positive attention that we have or just attention and inspiration that we have accomplished and I think the ArrayCast has been a pretty large part of it because of our reach maybe not as much of a influence as what just Conor has had on his own. His YouTube videos and his other podcast probably has bigger reach, bigger influence. [04] But obviously we can't track what has had the influence. It's just a lot of throwing things at the walls and we don't even know if it sticks.

Marshall Lochbaum

36:54-37:12

Maybe I can mention that one thing I'll have more time to spend on is the APL wiki, which I have been editing more lately. Yeah. It's a pretty big deal that you can just search for some weird aspect of APL and get usually a decent article on it.

Adám Brudzewsky

37:16-37:29

Yes. Yeah, of course, we don't even know. We don't know which kind of people are using the APL wikI, who reads what. That's what I'm saying. Much of it is just like throwing things out there, and then hopefully some people have benefit of it.

Bob Therriault

37:31-38:23

And I guess the thing I should mention at this point is when we came back from Scotland, we spent four days in Dublin. I had a chance to meet Ed Gottsman face to face. And Ed's the one who did the Array Portal. And that's a fantastic tool for getting into the wiki as well as other things like the wider... forums and stuff. It's a wonderful tool for exploring the language. And shout out to Ed for doing it. And I think Ed, when he went from the J viewer, I think is what it was originally called to the APL portal or the, yeah, the, the array portal. So I say APL, the array portal. And I think that was working with you, Adám, was that he was working with you on developing that to the wider base. And, there's a number of things that kind of happen as adjacent to the podcast over the same time, right?

Marshall Lochbaum

38:24-39:19

Yeah, well, so something that has really affected me, which has nothing to do with the array community at all, is that the ACM opened up their old articles to be free for viewing. At first, they did it for a limited period for coronavirus. And then at some point, they just decided, well, anything older than some age is going to be free for anyone. And so that includes nearly everything that was published in the Quote Quad, everything published at almost all of the APL conferences. And so I've been able to learn a lot about APL history that way that otherwise I, well, I had, I could have read it in print while I worked at Dyalog and had access to their, Quote Quad collection and vector collection and all. But yeah, I mean, now I can read it. I can put a citation on the APL wiki. Anyone can read it. That's what's allowed us to do this Quote Squad group as well. um, So that's pretty cool. And just a complete coincidence.

Bob Therriault

39:23-39:27

so Conor how did it affect you well how have you seen it change

Conor Hoekstra

39:48-46:02

uh I mean I will maybe answer a slightly different question but I think it even though it's an answer to a different question it hopefully will satisfy Stephen's original question and I'm... You know, the original question being, you know, how have our views on array languages changed or APL changed? And you made the comment at one point, you know, it would be a real shame if after, you know, the four years and all the hours we put into this, you know, there wasn't some kind of delta. But I think that less about my views changing and I've learned an immense amount. Like I looked it up. 2021 May is when we started the podcast. Yeah. I only picked up APL. on December 9th of 2019. And that means that I wasn't even a year and a half old in, you know, APL months or years. And so the majority of my, you know, growth in array languages has happened while this podcast has gone on. And so it's kind of hard for me to like, um, differentiate, you know, what has actually changed? Like I've learned a ton. Um, but the, the main thing that I think when, uh, Stephen asked his question is that I think that this podcast, um, for not everyone that listens, but definitely for a certain percentage, um, I don't know what the right adjective is. It's important, or it's just that people get a lot of value out of it. And that's because I am an avid podcast listener myself, and I know how much... it, like podcasts can mean to someone not for everyone like Marshall said he's not a big podcast guy he prefers the written form writing himself which is part of the reason why the bqn docs are so phenomenal um you know it's it's not just coming from me many folks have said that um you know, the BQN docs are just great. And there's even been times where Marshall has said, you know, a lot of times I'll get a question here or there or whatever, but I'll just go, you know, write something, whether it's in the commentary or, you know, an expansion on some glyph so that in the future, you know, people can just go and find that themselves. I don't need to worry about, you know, answering the same question over and over again. The point being is that, you know, people prefer different modes of content. There's videos, there's the written form, there's podcasts. For me personally, though, I, I love podcasts. I listen, you know, in my app to like, I don't know, it fluctuates because I erase some, I add some, but it's like 60 plus or minus. Some of them don't actively post, but definitely there's like 40 podcasts that post regularly. Currently there's, I think, 21 podcasts in my queue. I don't like it being above 10.

Adám Brudzewsky

Podcasts or episodes?

Conor Hoekstra

Episodes. I would say like on an, on a weekly basis. I probably listen to 70 to 100 podcast episodes. Like there are days when like 20 drop. Some of them are 15 minutes, 30 minutes. They're not all like an hour. But anyways, I just I listen to a ton. And for the podcasts that I really, really like, you know, CPP cast was one for a really long time. We mentioned that before we started recording. They have retired twice now. There was 350 episodes and then the two hosts retired. Then it came back. And then those two hosts just retired after episode 402. Yeah. I know when that podcast retired, I don't want to say it broke my heart, but it's just like it becomes such a regular part of your week. And I love hearing about like the community, the news, the interviews. And I was having this like visualization. If anyone's seen the TV show LokI, which is a Marvel show before Marvel started going downhill. But there is like it deals with the multiverse. And a lot of times there's this visualization where there's like the, the core timeline or something. I can't really remember what it's called, but like picture like a, a kind of glowing branch with like a bunch of things that are forking off of it. And if like, if the core timeline for, cause I can't remember what it's actually called, if that gets disrupted, then everything just like kind of falls apart and it's like chaos. Yeah. And so like, you need to keep the, and that's what the TVA is, the, the time something authority that, They have to keep that all intact. And I view certain podcasts as that for the community. And I know not everyone listens to podcasts, so it's a little bit generous to say that that's the go-to for everything. But for folks that do like listening to podcasts, that's what a podcast can act as. It's a thing that ties everything together. And without it, how do you... I mean, there's websites that curate that kind of information and stuff, or even YouTube channels that sometimes... Sometimes they cover that. Like that's actually initially my YouTube channel was supposed to be like the go-to weekly update on competitive programming contests across like hacker rank and code forces. And anyways, this is a long winded ramble being or trying to say that I really do feel that like what CPP cast was for the C++ community. Array cast has been and will hopefully continue to be that for the array community. And so even if our views change. didn't even change from the beginning to the end. I feel that for a certain set of the folks that listen to us, you know, I remember Elias, creator of Kap, at one point we made some offhanded remark like, oh, you know, if we recorded these for four hours, no one would listen. And, you know... I know that there's folks like Elias out there that shared his view. Like if you made it four hours, we would listen. And also to a lot of folks, including myself as an avid podcast listener, I never leave feedback. I never like email to say like, oh, I just want to let you know, like your podcast, like it's a, it's, you know, the highlight of my every week or two weeks when it drops. And I'm one of the first people to listen. There's a ton of people I think that have that relationship with podcasts, but they never go out. and like leave that feedback. And I'm not saying please, you know, flood our inbox. I'm just trying to say is that like, I know just because we don't hear from those folks doesn't mean they're out there. And, you know, if we end up titling this something clickbaity, like, you know, the end of an era or something. And I know that like, people are going to be like, is it, is it ending? Like not everybody. I'm sure some people would be like, Oh, it was a good run. You know, you know, 117, 18 episodes. This is good enough. Uh, but there's other folks that I'm sure would be like, please do not tell me that this is ending. Um, and, and, you know, maybe, maybe I'm wrong.

Marshall Lochbaum

46:02-46:05

Did you actually say the episode number at the start? I feel like you didn't.

Conor Hoekstra

46:07-46:15

Oh, maybe I didn't. Well, like I said, it's been like two months since we recorded and there's no editing. So if I didn't, this is episode 118.

Marshall Lochbaum

46:16-46:20

One for every element. Except, well, there's some caveats to that.

Adám Brudzewsky

46:21-47:29

Yeah, yeah. But I think there's a secondary effect of the podcast. This time we didn't do it, but usually we start with a round of announcements, other than Bob's announcement. And I think that, at least for me, has been an incentive to get other things out there so that I can announce them here. We have to generate news in order so we can report the news. Yeah, no, definitely. And I know that this podcast has somewhat of a reach. And we have a problem with Dyalog, that we have this mailing list and various social media with feeds and so on. The people we reach through those are the people who will stay on top of things anyway. Those are not the people we want to attract. Those are the people that are only there. How do we reach further out? So by having things, events, and so on, being able to announce them here, it sort of gives an incentive to do stuff.

Conor Hoekstra

47:30-49:30

I think so, at least. It feels like that to me. And on a personal note, too, before we started this, I had never been to an Iverson College. I'd never been to a Minnowbrook. I'm not even sure... I know Adám, we had interacted, it's like so long ago. It's like, that's why it's hard to think like pre-ArrayCast, you know, was there a before time? Like, obviously there was. But like we had interacted on the, what do they call them? British APL webinars and stuff and, and on other forums. But just like so much has come out of this. And also too, it's like Bob said, like I know when Kai was, when we first interviewed KaI, you know, talked about listening to ArrayCast and designing a Uiua and now tinyAPL is out. And I'm not saying that these languages exist because of ArrayCast, obviously not, but their references, like deep references of conversation. And that was the thing. Like when I first got into APL, I talked about it in a talk called twin algorithms link in the show notes and Um, but like at the time I had heard about it a number of times, like once in a university class, uh, once from one of my sisters that worked on a software program called MetSim that used APL. Uh, another sister had heard of, uh, APL because they used KDB plus at work. And that's, uh, uses q and q is a derivative of APL. I had only heard of it like four or five times. And then because I was listening to Functional Geekery [05] in like a five or six episode span, and I believe Morten Kronberg is one of the guests in those three episodes, it gets mentioned like kind of within a 10 episode period, three different episodes focus on APL or the array languages. And at the time that was like the the resources of podcasts is like, Oh, this one functional, uh, you know, programming language podcast had three episodes in their a hundred plus episodes that like mentioned it, uh, go look at those. And, and now look what we have. Well, like you've got a cornucopia of like over a hundred hours of, of content for folks that are interested and a ton of folks won't be interested, but for Yeah, I think that is, like I said, even if our views haven't changed, I definitely think that like the resources that we provided and the conversations that I would have never had with folks like, you know, what was the back to back episodes? I always forget of Stephen Proctor and Joel Kaplan. And like those two, I just...

Bob Therriault

49:30-49:31

Was it Stevan Apter?

Conor Hoekstra

49:32-51:30

Yeah. And, uh, yeah, but those, I remember those two back to back were like, not that. And I don't mean to not single out all the other amazing conversations, but I always just remember, like, I was like, when would I have ever gotten to, you know, chat with these folks? And, um, it was like so many times on the podcast, um, where we have a guest that's kind of in like story mode. I'm just sitting there being like, this is better than like most entertainment that I like consume on whatever platform because I'm so deeply interested in the history of this stuff. And yeah, so I don't think that we have to be worried about like, did we make it, you know, change people's views or, you know, was there personal growth, blah, blah, blah. I think just having like, having like done this, even if we were to stop today would, I think, like I said, not for everyone in the world, not even necessarily for everyone that's listening to us, but definitely for a percentage of the folks that listen to us. I think it's, it's provided. Yeah. Like a ton of value. And I think like, for me, that's like, That's all I would ask for. And that's like, that's just like, you know, like I said, that ignores my own personal growth and how much I've learned and blah, blah, blah. And like the privilege that it is to have these conversations. All that stuff is just like the cherries on top. Yeah. Anyways, that's my very long winded and rambly view. I'm not sure if that answers your question, Stephen. And I'm also curious to get to get your thoughts of has it changed your view or. Yeah. How do you how do you feel having spent the years that you did working on this?

Stephen Taylor

51:34-54:55

Honored and delighted to work on this. Yeah, it's been a real pleasure. My views have changed. Yeah. Like you, I've learned a great deal of stuff I had no idea was going on. um There's so many smart people that this community connects to. And one of the chief things I've learned is that the boundaries between APL and a whole raft of other programming languages are much softer and more blurred than I had supposed that they were. There's so much of the ideas in the Iverson notation, which has seeped out into other languages. You see them all over the place. That said, I still get annoyed when I have to code in things other than APL or q. Do I really have to type this stuff out? Can I not just have a single symbol to do it, please? And that's true even though nobody types these days. Yes. You just hit tab and the editor kind of does the next thing for you, which is a whole different way of writing. I learned today that I, to see myself as a craft programmer, somebody who actually enjoys the process, the typing, putting the code together and sweating over the details. And... So as a craft programmer, I... I don't get much pleasure or reward from just hitting tab and having the editor fill the code in for me. But this is part of what I see as a future for APL and one in which I'm still putting time into, even if I'm not on the podcast. I should pass on a couple of warnings I got about AI. One from the Edinburgh Fringe this year, where one of the speakers said, Yeah. there's so many people worried about AI these days. Me, I wonder what the other vowels are up to. And then my former colleague Simon Garland in Switzerland said, yeah, actually, when you hear AI, you should really just think I, I, I. Yeah. But the more serious point under this relates back to the theme of hospicing modernity that Bob introduced. So part of the pattern of a civilization of slow collapse is the death of decay of infrastructure. And in my lifetime, programming has come to rely more and more on massive infrastructure. Like if I can't produce code without a huge AI form with a hydroelectric dam behind it powering it up, we've come a long way since then.

Adám Brudzewsky

54:56-54:58

You're lucky if it's hydroelectric that's what's powering it.

Stephen Taylor

54:59-57:48

Yeah, maybe a nuclear plant or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Looking at the history of previous civilizations, I'm going to put a note in here for a superb book that came out earlier this year called Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp. So... We'll put that in the show notes. When you look at the pattern of collapse that's repeated over and over as civilizations peak and start to fall apart, we'll, The infrastructure starts to go. If you look back at the Roman Empire, they stopped being able to maintain the roads. So we can foresee in the future that huge infrastructure like this, it's not going to disappear, but it's going to become less and less widely available. We're living in a moment where AI services are effectively free to anybody who wants to use them and can deploy on these vast infrastructure clouds. Well, that's not going to go away, but it's unlikely to stay effectively free and open to everybody. advice I have heard for young people today contemplating what should I do by way of a career is to avoid infrastructure. Early living in a way that doesn't require a huge amount of infrastructure around it, work in a way in which you can get paid directly by the people who benefit from your work. There's some of this in the talk, at the end of the talk I gave at Lambda World last year, Conor. [06] And when you apply this to IT, it's like, how are you going to provide value as a software developer to people? without relying on huge cloud services? Is there a way in which you can do this? And this takes me back to the early days of APL when it established a huge reputation for being able to put software software systems together quite quickly for individuals and small groups. A lot of that became Excel spreadsheets in the following decades. It was personal computing before there were personal computers. But that I see as one thing. One of the important potentialities for the future of the Iversonian languages that you can be able in the future to put software systems together. That was it.

Conor Hoekstra

57:53-58:33

I just love the meta-ness of I'm pretty sure zoom was adding thumbs up and little floating thumbs up in a bubble because you were accidentally I try to do it on my screen but I think it was recognized it was like doing some kind of visual recognition visual recognition god this is why we've We are going to miss Bob dearly because that's going to make it into the cut. And, uh, but I haven't been able to figure out unless if someone was thumbs upping Stephen in the background, um, you got the magic hands though, Stephen, uh, that somehow made that stuff show up. Hmm.

Bob Therriault

58:35-59:08

So the next steps going forward, because the ArrayCast, in spite of Conor saying about it not continuing in its present form, it will continue, which I'm grateful for. Because when I said I wasn't going to be producing it anymore, I thought, well, that could be the end of it. And I thought, well, that could be the end of it. But it's not going to be the end of it. Conor and Adám are going to carry on. putting you guys on the spot. What are your plans? How do you, how do you see for a person listening today? What are, what can they look forward to?

Conor Hoekstra

59:10-01:00:16

Our, our current plans are non-existent, but the podcast will be back and we will figure out what we are going to do. Expect that if this is episode 118, this is a, is it a guarantee by the end of January, this is a, 2026 episode one 19 will be out. We, we promise that it's probably just going to be Adám and I for the first one. We're going to be figuring stuff out. Um, I think you can expect that we will try and build out from just the two of us. It's not just going to be, uh, Adám and myself, And, and then, yeah, I mean, I would love to keep it a similar kind of format, but I mean, Adám and I will discuss that in terms of like, on a biweekly basis. But yeah, we'll probably take a small break, because I'm basically going to be gone for the next month. um, And December is going to be very busy for me as well. And Adám's thumbsing up. We're all trying to get the analog way.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:00:17-01:00:18

Oh, now he did it the digital way.

Conor Hoekstra

01:00:20-01:00:21

Sometimes it's a setting in Zoom.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:00:22-01:00:24

Oh, I was going to say as you said, yeah.

Conor Hoekstra

01:00:25-01:00:30

All right. So Stephen's secretly, he's gone ahead and got the advance.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:00:30-01:00:54

But actually, giving you a thumbs up on what you're saying as well, obviously. This is a real thumbs up. Yeah, I mean, I'm... If it's just Conor and me for a little while, or maybe Rich Park will be in there, then I guess it will be a little bit more EPL-centric. And I think we'll have plenty of things to speak about by then.

Conor Hoekstra

01:00:55-01:01:58

Yes. I mean, that's the thing is I also, too, when, when, when, you know, this is inside baseball, but when Bob first messaged, we have a Slack where we kind of communicate in between episodes about, you know, the topics and guests and timing if we need to shift stuff. And Bob posted his message indicating that he was looking to, you know, take a step back for the reasons he detailed. And my first thought was like, no, like, no. This is one of my highlights of every couple of weeks. Whether it's a deep dive on Tacit or interviewing some guests, I would be very sad. Not just for the listeners not to get to hear the conversations, but also selfishly, just from my point of view. I consider this my little array language think tank. We've got four of you experts. Anyways, I would very much miss that. Yeah, definitely selfishly a part of the reason I'm continuing on is just so that we can I can continue to get to have these conversations, even if it's with a different cast of characters going forward. Yeah. Stephen.

Stephen Taylor

01:01:59-01:02:01

Do you want another Iverson College meeting?

Conor Hoekstra

01:02:03-01:03:08

I mean, I guess it's going to end up in the episode, but my current fiance, although by the time you're listening to this, I might be married if this goes out on Friday. So I guess now for the listener, my wife the other day mentioned like, oh, don't you have to go to Oxford or something? And I was like... Well, I mean, that's not like official, but there might be Iverson College at Oxford. And yes, you can come along next time if that ends up happening. So, yeah, I mean, I'd be interested. Like also to in two years time or whenever it be happening, my life might look a little bit different. I did say at Minnowbrook. Um, the odds that I would be at Minnowbrook in two years are substantially lower depending on how life unfolds. Um, but that does not mean the interest is not there. So whether I would be there, uh, you know, it depends on the gods above and the, you know, decisions that they have, uh, That doesn't make any sense, but Bob's going to leave it in. So anyways, the interest is there.

Bob Therriault

01:03:08-01:03:14

I think it makes sense perfectly well. It does make sense. Whether or not I end up there. Drifting into the mystical again. Yeah.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:03:15-01:03:29

I would like there to be another Iverson College. There's no secret that I wasn't as excited about the last one as the one before that I was at. But that doesn't mean it's a negative thing. It'd be interesting to see where Steven would take this.

Stephen Taylor

01:03:35-01:04:41

I'm thinking of running two kinds of events, and the kind that you particularly like, I think, Adám, would be largely APL and practice-focused. And the event we had last year at Cambridge was very much more ecumenical of people coming from all kinds of different languages. I'm thinking, let's just hold two kinds of events. Okay. But if you, dear listener, are interested in participating in an Iverson College meeting, here's my invitation. Write to warden at iversoncollege.com and tell me about... what you'd like to do and why you'd like to come, what kind of a meeting we should hold. I'll make sure that Miki's film of the last college event is up there, and I guess we'll put a link in the show notes. So if you know nothing about it before today, you can at least get a flavor of the event, what it was like.

Bob Therriault

01:04:41-01:07:03

Well, and we did two episodes out of it, so we can put those links into one was sort of the open forum of the group that was there and then others with reflections of people who had been through it and their feelings about it. Yeah, I think that was a that was a highlight for me of this conversation. this whole process is actually being able to go meet people face to face and hear all the different discussions. And essentially, if I wasn't already blown out of the water by how smart people were being in that room, it's just like, I kind of crept around trying not to expose too much of my ignorance because it's insane. And yet how kind people were, too. I mean, it wasn't like people were just so smart that you couldn't talk to them. They were friendly. They were kind. They were explaining things. I remember, well, there was two parts. I remember listening to Adám and Kai talk back and forth and just sitting there thinking, this is amazing. Yeah. Because Adám's discussing one part with regard to APL and Kai's talking about Uiua. And they're both just throwing these ideas back and forth. It was like watching Masters Tennis. It's amazing. And then the other one was sitting and having Aaron explain trees to me. you know, and me not getting it. And then him not just going, oh, no, no, no, you should have got that. He said, no, no, no, think of it this way. And then I understood them. I mean, it was just like, oh, man, it's just incredible. And that's, I guess, linking back to my reasons, can you imagine a world where kindness was rewarded the way intelligence is? Because right now we don't reward kindness at all, or barely at all. We do it within our families, we do it within our relationships. But if you're kind to other people, you could be kind to other people and starve to death. And that's not right. Because we reward intelligence. But how is intelligence used? Well, if it's not used for kindness, it's a problem. And I think that's one of the root things that, as we go forward as a civilization, we sort of have to address. We have to understand people who are kind are, if not more important, as important as people who are smart.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:07:05-01:07:15

I'm very much on board with that idea I mean it's probably too long a subject to bigger subject to discuss in this episode

Bob Therriault

01:07:15-01:07:17

that's what I'm going to be spending the next year doing

Adám Brudzewsky

01:07:18-01:08:40

yeah I think that's true I think it's it's a large part of the abandonment of religion. Religion has caused all kinds of bad, for sure. I'm not going to deny that. It still does. But I think many, if not most, or even all religions put a high value on kindness, being good, or whatever definition they have of being good. And that has, especially in the Western world, largely been replaced by this commercial focus, capitalism thing, where success is not measured in how good you are, as you say, but by how business-wise successful you are, which to a certain degree correlates to intelligence. I'm not... I'm not sure if it really comes into intelligence, but business acumen or elbows, if you want. And as long as we focus on that and encourage that, it just tells the children that that's how you should behave. It's a self-reinforcing cycle. Yeah. So

Stephen Taylor

01:08:41-01:10:15

Now it's getting really interesting I didn't know we were going here But let's roll with it So as Bob introduced The concept of What happens as we move towards Societal collapse and we've discussed that Mickey, my partner and I went a few weeks ago to a amazing place, a venue In London called Kairos to hear Roger Hallam give his First talk after coming out of prison. Roger was one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion and of Just Stop Oil. And so 14 months of a remarkable five year sentence for giving a talk on Zoom. We're not talking on Zoom here, are we? And we were rather expecting to hear from his reflections on politics, organisations, strategy for building the world that's to follow modernity. And... And to our surprise, he began with Thomas á Kempis and the Imitation of Christ, a key medieval Christian text that, and the uses of suffering. His message to us was that in the coming years, things are going to get so awful for us that nothing's going to hold us in the face of despair but some kind of religious connection, the conviction that we are doing the right thing, whether it works or not. Hmm.

Bob Therriault

01:10:21-01:10:48

yeah I wonder at that the concern I get is people who do the right thing irrespective of what's going on I can understand his thoughts on that but uh to me that's a lot of the maybe the more negative sides of religion is when people follow the doctrine or the the thoughts and don't think about kindness I mean don't think about the base and decency of the other beings on the planet unfortunately it gets it gets abused often, yeah.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:10:48-01:12:14

But if you look into the foundation texts of various religions you I think you'll find a lot of focus on the on the kindness. It actually, it just struck me. I don't know if that's the case by other real languages, but, and I don't even know if it's the case by every language using companies, but at Dyalog, we have an interesting situation where we have a lot of bright people And certainly a good chunk of those could get significantly higher salaries working other places. But they choose to work there because they perceive it as superior in other ways than just making money. call it kindness because if you want they think they're doing something good for the world or it's just good in some other way or they want to feel that it's meaningful, something they like or just because it's an They find that for them it's a nice place to work, nice people to work with, whatever. But it is possible for us as humans to rip ourselves out of that current of striving towards commercial success.

Stephen Taylor

01:12:15-01:12:57

I had help. I've spent 10 years working for I.P. Sharp Associates, [07] and most of that time we were making good money. But I refer back to our earlier episode on I.P. Sharp Associates, this 21st century startup that ran on email with a flat hierarchy and was gender blind and was somehow working in the 1970s. 10 years of working for them. ruins me for life in the real corporate world of today. I've never been a comfortable fit in any corporation sense. But as you say, you can get out of the water.

Bob Therriault

01:13:00-01:15:17

Yeah, and yet the work that I.P. Sharp was doing, to me it's a bit like a submarine that was traveling through the water. It had its environment, it had its... egalitarian, non-gendered role, and yet look what that submarine was doing. You know, a lot of the stuff that we're dealing now is that they were dealing with large banks, exchanging huge amounts of money back and forth, contributing. One of the big things that they were involved with was the start of the IMF and all those kind of things. All those things are built on the way we look at the world as a society and as apart from actual beings who are part of the world. We're thinking we're not part of the world, so we act in different ways. And you were talking about Yeah. the discomfort we're probably going to find in the next couple of years. I'm not wishing that on anybody, but I would say the thing that I take the most hope from is that it's possible to become comfortable with uncomfortable situations. It's possible to be in an uncomfortable situation and just let it be and learn what you can from it. You don't have to solve it. That I have to solve this is part of the problem. Some of these problems cannot be solved, and certainly not by individuals, and even collectively may not be able to be solved, because there's an aspect of it that's beyond what we do know. And that's just the way the world works. You can't have control over all of this. We exist on this planet. This planet is what it is. All the beings on this planet were part of that. And we can affect the planet, but we can't, we can't, quotes, control the planet. That's not how it works...... Yeah. we get these from time to time when we're recording there's a mic drop everybody stops and and thinks and and reflects but we probably should we're well past the hour mark I think uh Conor

Conor Hoekstra

01:15:18-01:16:24

yes yeah we should wind down this uh probably the uh, most unique episode we've recorded here over our 118 episodes. Um, and yeah, I, I probably would say at least for me, the perfect way to end this is, um, is, is not just to thank Bob, but to, to thank, uh, Marshall and Stephen as well, um, for all of your time that you've put into this. Um, but also too, I, I consider you all friends now and I hope we'll continue to, to stay friends. Um, And continue, whether even if it's not on ArrayCast, we're going to hopefully bump into each other at future events, even if it's... Or in some future Zoom, you know, they have online conferences and stuff like that. But then, you know, the... expression of gratitude I think most significantly we we should uh give to bob because uh uh I think we allude to it every once in a while on the podcast probably our listeners know that bob does all the editing all the uh polishing did not on this one oh yeah he did for the first 117 episodes um and and you are doing all the editing on this one

Marshall Lochbaum

01:16:29-01:16:30

All of the editing that's done.

Conor Hoekstra

01:16:30-01:16:32

But we all are. Technically, it was done.

Stephen Taylor

01:16:33-01:16:35

At last, an empty array joke.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:16:37-01:16:44

Everyone in the world is doing all the editing on this episode.

Marshall Lochbaum

01:16:46-01:16:48

Not if you count the plain mixing and whatever happens.

Bob Therriault

01:16:49-01:16:59

Yeah. And the other thing that there are two edits that are going to be put on, of course. and the two edits are the opening music and the closing music and the cold open. So...

Conor Hoekstra

01:17:01-01:18:56

But I mean, that stuff is, uh, the point I'm trying to make here is as a, uh, uh, editor of podcast myself, uh, I know how much work it can be, but also, I don't put nearly as much polish and maybe kindness is the word into my editing. I keep mine shorter. I splice and dice them up specifically to reduce the amount of work. And I know that Bob is the opposite. uh, Bob, he will take what I think is the kind of rough cut, maybe not our best episode. And then I will re-listen to the edit afterwards and be like, Bob, what did you do? Like, this is not even in the same conversation. You will have rearranged parts, inserted something, cut all the stuff that I thought wasn't whatever. And it ends, I, you know, you will probably recall the episode. There was an episode one time where I was like, beside myself afterwards thinking like, how did that go so poorly? And I was like, I don't even know if I can continue on as moderator. Like I lost all confidence. And then I listened to the edit afterwards. And I was like, you are a magician, Bob. Like, I don't even recognize that conversation. Like that was not the conversation that we had and you made it sound amazing. Anyways, so I just I want the listener to know and you to know how thankful I am. And I probably can speak on behalf of the other panelists. All the work that you've done over the years, you will be missed. And I think we can also tell the listener that don't expect there might be a degradation in polish and quality. You know, the content will still be there. But, you know, you might have heard the nicest sounding edits of podcasts. in the past and going forward, um, they might not be as, as, as squeaky clean and as professional as, as Bob was able to do them. So, um, you will be missed. Thank you so much. I'm not sure if other folks want to, uh, say any last things, um, on this final episode of, uh, the concluding chapter, is it chapter one or chapter four? I don't know how many, how many chapters this was, but yeah.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:18:57-01:19:54

I mean, I want to express a little bit of looking forward to the future as well. It's not that I'm excited to see the people go, that are going. And obviously not. And I'm thankful to everyone, especially Bob. But I'm also really excited about the future. because, Conor, we're going to have so much fun stuff to speak about.

Conor Hoekstra

They're not even gone and Adám's like, this is going to be better than it was before.

Adám Brudzewsky

I want to say to the listeners, this is not dead. No, no. Especially if we take a long break now until the next episode. Listen, Dyalog version 20 is going to be out. That's the biggest thing ever for me. I think the biggest... the addition change revolution in in APL notation for a long time um and uh yeah there'll be all kinds of other things going on there'll be lots of things to speak

Conor Hoekstra

01:19:56-01:19:57

Stephen, I saw your hand go up as well.

Stephen Taylor

01:19:59-01:20:15

Yeah, I've got two things actually. Adám just mentioned Dyalog20. I've been doing development work in Dyalog20 for some of Dyalog's internal systems. about I'm really excited about it too. I might need to come back onto that episode as a user.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:20:16-01:20:24

Yeah, this is a whole new world. We're going to discuss whole new ways of developing and whole new ways of storing data arrays.

Stephen Taylor

01:20:24-01:20:58

yeah that is a pretty good pretty good topic uh but I wanted to uh uh my zen teacher when we used to finish uh meditation retreats would note that we could none of us do all that sitting by ourselves um we couldn't have done or experienced what we've had on this podcast or learn what we've learned without all of us here. So I propose the thanks from all of us to all of us.

Bob Therriault

01:21:00-01:22:07

Well said. Yeah. And I have gratitude to the listeners as well. The feedback we've got has been always really good. The guests we have on have been great. incredibly accommodating. This is something that the rest of the group doesn't do, but I do the test session to make sure the audio and everything is up to the quality. And we're asking, you know, extra time, maybe a change of location, maybe go get a microphone. That whole process, you know, I talked to them. Guests are great about that. And they come on and they expose us in a lot of cases to a whole different environment or context of these languages and this way of approaching them and uses of them and sometimes new languages it's uh I've got huge gratitude to the people who took the time to do that and the listener of course because without the listener uh well we would still do this honestly we if you weren't listening we we we've Well, we might not have set the time aside on a regular basis, but we would have liked it.

Stefan Kruger (from a recording)

01:22:07-01:22:16

This will, even if we do nothing, it will lift the performance of APL as well. This is sometimes called the bitter lesson.

Bob Therriault

01:22:17-01:22:24

What is happening? Another podcast. A voice came in. The voice from beyond. Wow.

Marshall Lochbaum

01:22:26-01:22:31

I think you've got to cut that out, Bob. If nothing else, because we don't have the copyright. That sounds like... Wow.

Conor Hoekstra

01:22:33-01:22:38

I think that was Stefan Kruger from... I was going to say, I didn't want to say it, but I sounded like Stefan.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:22:38-01:22:44

Yeah, I think he's presenting some feature of Dyalog 20. This is...

Stephen Taylor

01:22:44-01:22:59

That was me. I was listening to Stefan's presentation at Minnowbrook, and I think it must have got reactivated from the last few minutes. Most interesting talk about the relationship between APL and AI.

Bob Therriault

01:23:00-01:23:05

And it was less than 20 seconds, so I think we're into fair dealings. I think we're okay. Don't have to be cut.

Stephen Taylor

01:23:09-01:23:11

I'm going to put Stefan's talk in the show notes.

Bob Therriault

01:23:12-01:24:45

The reference preview of coming attractions. Yeah. Yeah, I do feel gratitude to everybody involved and you guys for sure, the time you've taken to be part of this, the efforts to entertain this idea and then be part of it is so cool. As Stephen says, we couldn't have done it on our own and as a group together. going forward. I think I'm really gratified that it is going forward. I remember Stephen telling me what a success would be to him for this podcast. He says in 10 years, if somebody else, I handed off to somebody else who was younger, that would be my, my rap. That would be perfect. And I thought, yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. And I'm sure, um, I'm sure that'll happen in the evolution of things. It will be what it is. If you have a big problem with these changes, maybe think about your relationship to change. That might be the issue, not so much the changes themselves, but you might have to accommodate change in your life. That's a big ask. I'm not suggesting that people have to do that. Yeah. The world is what it is. As Margaret Thatcher used to say, it's a funny old world. I don't know whether she meant what I meant when I said it.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:24:47-01:25:01

So, Bob, well, you have to remove this if this is inappropriate, but... You're not just quitting the ArrayCast, right? As you sort of alluded to, it's...

Bob Therriault

01:25:03-01:25:18

Yeah, you're right. One of the things when I came on, when I did my introduction, usually I say I'm a J enthusiast. I didn't say that. I said, this is my last ArrayCast episode. yeah I'm stepping back from this stuff

Adám Brudzewsky

01:25:18-01:25:37

so you're not working on the J wiki any more and so on

Bob Therriault

that's not my plan to do that

Adám Brudzewsky

so I have a very difficult question for you at the end of this episode will you be able to say happy array programming to people? Or will that feel sort of like fake to you?

Bob Therriault

01:25:37-01:26:06

I will be able to say it because I will be able to say it for other people. I will wish other people happy array programming. I won't be doing it, but happy array programming to other people. And honestly, it would be silly for me to say these tools aren't available and I'm aware of them and I can use them. (laughter) There may be times when I use technology. Why wouldn't I use technology? It's a bigger question of how I use it, I think.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:26:07-01:26:10

I mean, you won't be able to live and not use technology.

Bob Therriault

01:26:11-01:26:24

Yeah, exactly. And that would be, I would say silly, except I know in history, there have been people who've actually gone to live in caves and stuff and more power to them. But I don't see that as a...

Adám Brudzewsky

01:26:24-01:26:42

But no technology at all? That sounds tough. That's not just off the grid type thing. That's you're going to climb around naked in trees, picking off little buds from the branches to eat because you won't use technology, right? As opposed to great apes that do use technology.

Bob Therriault

01:26:43-01:26:58

You have identified how pervasive the technology is in our lives. You can't imagine living without it. Well, you're a living being. You can live without it. You may not do very well.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:27:00-01:27:02

Your life will be short and bitter.

Bob Therriault

01:27:05-01:27:07

In nature, everything dies a violent death.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:27:08-01:27:13

No. I don't think that's true.

Bob Therriault

01:27:16-01:27:18

In wild nature, everything dies of violent death.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:27:19-01:27:23

I think that's an overly pessimistic view of things. No.

Stephen Taylor

01:27:24-01:27:27

We invented dying of old age, that's your point?

Adám Brudzewsky

01:27:28-01:27:54

Yeah, they don't die in their sleep. I don't think so. Certainly apex predators and other animals and plants that are not very susceptible to damage are not necessarily suffering a violent death. I don't think when a blue whale dies... it generally dies a violent death. I don't think that orcas die violent death either.

Bob Therriault

01:27:52-01:27:54

Well, it depends when you just... Orcas die... of starvation.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:27:57-01:27:58

Is that violent?

Marshall Lochbaum

01:28:00-01:28:03

I'm hoping to get lunch before the Quote Squad starts

Stephen Taylor

01:28:07-01:28:12

Well speaking of technology I'm going to miss seeing those snowshoes Behind you when we meet Yes.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:28:13-01:28:16

Oh yeah Are you staying living where you are Bob?

Bob Therriault

01:28:16-01:28:22

Oh yeah Yeah, no, I'm not planning to do that. I remain married. I'll see my kids.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:28:23-01:28:30

Marriage is not technology, but surviving in Canada is, right? Humans don't survive very well in Canada without technology.

Bob Therriault

01:28:31-01:28:41

Well, yeah. Honestly, I don't know what the next year or years will bring.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:28:41-01:28:46

But you mean specifically direct interaction with computer technology, right? That's...

Bob Therriault

01:28:48-01:28:49

I will still be interacting with computers.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:28:50-01:28:53

Oh, okay. Yeah. You'll still be turning on electric lights.

Bob Therriault

01:28:54-01:28:56

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I'm not...

Adám Brudzewsky

01:28:57-01:28:59

Not becoming a caveman.

Bob Therriault

01:28:59-01:29:20

Well, again, a year from now, I might have changed my approach. But right now, I don't see a... A reason to do that, what I see a reason to do is to go deeper into the areas that I have to work on. Not so much to, and some of that may be taking away things for sure. You take away some things to make space for other things.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:29:21-01:29:25

For future listeners, if you see Bigfoot, it might just be Bob Theriault.

Bob Therriault

01:29:26-01:29:36

You should have seen me during COVID when I let my beard grow out and stuff. Yeah, I aged, I looked much older than I am. or than I look now, I guess.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:29:37-01:29:39

Trimmers and scissors are also technology. So, yeah.

Bob Therriault

01:29:40-01:29:43

That's true. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Taylor

01:29:43-01:29:59

I'll be looking forward to seeing not so much how you managed naked and alone on the Pacific shore without technology, but where this interesting impulse of yours takes you to. And I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:29:59-01:30:15

I would say send us some selfies, but maybe that's inappropriate. But send us some cave paintings that you'll be peeling off the wall. Then you can scratch a selfie of yourself into some bark with your nails, not with a tool.

Bob Therriault

01:30:18-01:30:26

Yeah. I, too, am very interested to see what the next year brings. I'm looking forward to it.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:30:26-01:30:29

I hope we can stay a little bit in touch, at least somehow.

Bob Therriault

01:30:18-01:30:26

Yeah. No, absolutely.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:30:26-01:30:29

Because I would be curious to see where you take this.

Bob Therriault

01:30:33-01:30:33

Yeah. And other people have expressed the same thing.

Adám Brudzewsky

01:30:37-01:30:40

It's an interesting thought and something that I have entertained a long time ago, this sort of a back to nature type thought. Yeah. I haven't done it

Bob Therriault

01:30:50-01:31:26

It's certainly intriguing in that way. At one point in my life I did it. I went back and built a cabin in the woods for you know a couple months on my own and I've done that But Yeah, so I don't think I'm doing that again. I'm actually going a different direction than I did at that time. That's why I kind of see it as growth. There's different challenges, and they're much more internal, I think. Yeah that I have to entertain discomfort in a number of areas to grow, which is good. Yeah.

Conor Hoekstra

01:31:32-01:31:37

I think that that is the perfect way to end. And with that, we will say happy array programming.

All(except bob)

01:31:38-01:31:40

Happy array programming.

Bob Therriault

01:31:40-01:31:42

Happy array programming to everybody.

Music

01:31:43 -01:31:57