I am trying to catch up with the material that we’ve covered (that session from last Friday with @abrudz was legendary! 
such a beautiful discussion between Adam and Jeremy, so many cool insights)
APL still seems to me like this foreign, intricate world that I am not fully sure how it operates 
That is to be expected at this phase. But at the same time I can’t shake off the feeling how familiar it all seems…
Yeah, so there are a bunch of operators that do fancy things, but I have operated on various slices of arrays for a couple of years now when using numpy, pytorch, or even pandas! Even the notation for subsetting arrays seems familiar
This is not a stab at APL, just an observation on something I found quite interesting and astounding (and I realize APL takes that reasoning to a whole new level, one I don’t fully appreciate yet as there is still so much for me to learn and experiment with). Probably speaks to the pollination of ideas from the APL world into the Python world and the curious situation people in the fast.ai community find themselves in – we probably don’t interact with computers how most programmers out there do.
But what completely blew my mind is how foreign APL must feel to someone who doesn’t have the background of using scientific computing in the form of numpy or R! I mean, I still remember doing something like the following in Java (or C) to iterate over an array of rank 3:
for i in ..:
for j in ...:
for k in ...:
I wonder if things have changed, if there is something in these other languages people use nowadays to interact with arrays like we can do in Python? Guess I will learn more from the talk shared by Adam above! Anyhow, to step from this world into APL – now that must be a ride
And the other slightly tangential thought is that it is quite amazing that there is a sustainable business model to APL, that there is a company apparently living of maintaining and developing a programming language and its ecosystem! I think this is really cool – so foreign to what we know from the Python world. In a sense, it is like encountering a unicorn, a magnificent and unique beast, so it automatically piques your interest – how does it work? Really cool!
Hoping Jeremy feels better soon and produces a lot of antibodies in the process I quite enjoy getting vaccinated and feeling the immune system kick into high gear. Probably one of the more enjoyable experiences about the whole pandemic – experiencing the effects of science and doing something good for yourself (and the people around you).
Anyhow, really looking forward for the next steps of this journey, and all the upcoming goodies (juliacon keynote, nbdev2, wow). It’s Christmas in July! Which only makes sense, because its supposedly middle of the winter here…
I only started listening to it but it is amazing!!! Probably a gateway drug into a wonderful world of niche podcasts that were mentioned early on in the talk 
Too bad it is finishing in a day! Sounds like an awesome learning resource.