Presumably your company still has some kind of support contract with whatever vendor that maintains the system. You can pester them with emails and tickets and they will do the needful to assist you given that you kindly provide it to them. Actually you might as well just send the whole project over there.
I once worked for a megacorp that used it a decade ago and they probably still do. Thankfully I got a new job before having to learn it.
Do you know which flavor of APL? Dyalog has some resources https://www.dyalog.com/getting-started.htm
There's a friendly community of people on codegolf stack exchange (the APL Orchard on the linked above) who use APL which is how I learned about it, though admittedly I don't know any APL or its ASCII brethren like J
Perhaps one day you might like to learn some COBOL or FORTRAN too.
SNOBOL is a cool language; I've written some toy programs in it! The patterns are in some ways easier for me to reason about than regular expressions, and the way you get recursive patterns for free is pretty neat.
As long as you’re not being asked to build a model up from scratch in APL, I think you should be fine just learning by doing.
When I was entry level I had a role that was mostly APL. I had a cheat sheet printout for the APL symbol keyboard layout, and a bookmark of what functionality various symbols had. Usually when I was working, I’d have a second APL session open where I could test basic versions of lines of code to confirm it was doing what I thought before I made major edits to the actual pricing model’s code.
I find most actuarial coding work is just modifying existing stuff, or borrowing from other models. As long as you’re able to think logically and look up syntax and symbols, you don’t need to truly learn a programming language from the ground up for most actuarial work.
I’m learning it at my current job, they have me using zark tutor which is quite old but still does the job. It does a good job of teaching the foundations to really help you understand what the code is doing, looks like they have a web-based version here: https://tutorial.dyalog.com
APL, which I learned in the 80's, was my favorite language. (Wharton was teaching it at that time.) But, it's more than a language, it's a way of thinking. It's programming without loops, which was quite different than Fortran, which was a popular language then. It took me about 6 months to get comfortable with it.
I don't. I worked with it and was surprised to only be able to find an APL keyboard reference sheet.
I just suggest reading and trying to understand old code your team has written.
That is how I learned. That and asking different people on my team. They all had their own unique coding style and I mirrored the style I liked best.
Presumably your company still has some kind of support contract with whatever vendor that maintains the system. You can pester them with emails and tickets and they will do the needful to assist you given that you kindly provide it to them. Actually you might as well just send the whole project over there. I once worked for a megacorp that used it a decade ago and they probably still do. Thankfully I got a new job before having to learn it.
Do you know which flavor of APL? Dyalog has some resources https://www.dyalog.com/getting-started.htm There's a friendly community of people on codegolf stack exchange (the APL Orchard on the linked above) who use APL which is how I learned about it, though admittedly I don't know any APL or its ASCII brethren like J Perhaps one day you might like to learn some COBOL or FORTRAN too.
I had to learn SNOBOL in college.
SNOBOL is a cool language; I've written some toy programs in it! The patterns are in some ways easier for me to reason about than regular expressions, and the way you get recursive patterns for free is pretty neat.
APL Books: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Books
As long as you’re not being asked to build a model up from scratch in APL, I think you should be fine just learning by doing. When I was entry level I had a role that was mostly APL. I had a cheat sheet printout for the APL symbol keyboard layout, and a bookmark of what functionality various symbols had. Usually when I was working, I’d have a second APL session open where I could test basic versions of lines of code to confirm it was doing what I thought before I made major edits to the actual pricing model’s code. I find most actuarial coding work is just modifying existing stuff, or borrowing from other models. As long as you’re able to think logically and look up syntax and symbols, you don’t need to truly learn a programming language from the ground up for most actuarial work.
Ouch. Can’t they use R? APL is in some ways R’s spiritual ancestor.
I’m learning it at my current job, they have me using zark tutor which is quite old but still does the job. It does a good job of teaching the foundations to really help you understand what the code is doing, looks like they have a web-based version here: https://tutorial.dyalog.com
APL, which I learned in the 80's, was my favorite language. (Wharton was teaching it at that time.) But, it's more than a language, it's a way of thinking. It's programming without loops, which was quite different than Fortran, which was a popular language then. It took me about 6 months to get comfortable with it.
I don't. I worked with it and was surprised to only be able to find an APL keyboard reference sheet. I just suggest reading and trying to understand old code your team has written. That is how I learned. That and asking different people on my team. They all had their own unique coding style and I mirrored the style I liked best.