Perhaps the "funny symbols" are not important to someone with a "few dozen" languages under his belt, but most people are not in that category and no novices are. Speaking from my personal experience, the APL character set has continued to cause me problems even years after the last time I programmed in it: an old paper of mine was recently re-printed in Vector, requiring a couple of hours of work for me and the editor to get the function listings to display properly, even though I had a PDF version of it.
I very much like the APL character set but I have decades of experience telling me it introduces an extra hassle when working with the language, particularly for presentation. On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 3:53 PM, David Mitchell <[email protected]>wrote: > I'll throw in a comment/story that is mostly true. I was hired at a large > company many years ago. One of my assignments was to eliminate APL usage, > which was seen as overly expensive and not in the preferred company > direction. At the time, APL was probably the most widely used language in > the company. > > I succeeded in my assignment to eliminate APL after many decades of work > in 2007. I suspect that there were pockets of continuing APL usage via the > PC versions of APL (or J). > > There are many reasons why APL was so difficult to eliminate. In my > opinion, these are mostly the same reasons that led to APL being, from many > points of view, one of the most important computer languages and > implementation environments in this company for many years. > > From what I saw of the adoption and later decline of APL usage, the APL > symbols were fairly far down on the list of the reasons for or against the > usage of APL at this company. > > In a way, this current discussion of symbology reminds me of the > internecine battles in the past over the theoretical correctness of various > implementations of enclosure. > > I will say my reasons for using both APL and J (and the dozen or so other > languages I use regularly) have not much to do with their usage of > symbolics or keywords. After learning the first few dozen languages, I > find that these differences are not very important to me. > > > On 4/11/2013 14:56, Björn Helgason wrote: > >> On Apr 11, 2013 5:47 PM, "Joey K Tuttle" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> I have been tempted, several times, to make one comment and that is a >>> >> feeling that the APL character set was perhaps the single most important >> reason for lack of widespread acceptance and use of APL... >> >>> >>> >>> I believe you are right. >> >> PS: A comment like that to c.l.a would not be popular. >> ------------------------------**------------------------------** >> ---------- >> For information about J forums see >> http://www.jsoftware.com/**forums.htm<http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm> >> >> ------------------------------**------------------------------** > ---------- > For information about J forums see > http://www.jsoftware.com/**forums.htm<http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm> > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
