"A+ is a descendent of the language "A" created in 1988 by
Arthur Whitney at Morgan Stanley.
At the time,
various departments had a significant investment in APL
applications and talent, APL being a language well-suited to
the manipulation of large arrays of numbers.
As technology was moving from the mainframe to distributed
systems, there was a search for a suitable APL implementation
to run on SunOS, the distributed platform of the period.
Not happy with the systems evaluated, Arthur, motivated by management,
wrote one geared to the business: large capacity, high
performance.
He
was joined in his efforts as the language took on graphics,
systems' interfaces, utility support, and an ever-widening
user community. Over the course of the next few years,
as the business began to reap tangible value from the efforts,
the pieces were shaped into a consistent whole and became A+.
The "+" referred to the electric graphical user interface.
An A+ development group was formally created in 1992.
A+ soon became the language of choice for development of
Fixed Income applications. It offered familiarity to the APL
programmers, the advantages of an interpreter in a fast-paced
development arena and admirable floating-point performance.
A significant driver was that many of Morgan Stanley's best and
brightest were the developers and supporters of the language.
Through their practical application of technical values, they
instilled fervent enthusiasm in talented programmers, regardless
of their programming language backgrounds.
A+ is a powerful and efficient programming
language. It is freely available under the
GNU General Public License.
It embodies a rich set of functions and operators, a modern graphical
user interface with many widgets and automatic synchronization of
widgets and variables, asynchronous execution of functions associated
with variables and events, dynamic loading of user compiled
subroutines, and many other features. Execution is by a rather
efficient interpreter. A+ was created at Morgan Stanley.
Primarily used in a computationally-intensive business environment,
many critical applications written
in A+ have withstood the demands of real world developers over many
years. Written in an interpreted language, A+ applications
tend to be portable. "
http://www.aplusdev.org/index.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13973812
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