
APL is more French than English (1978) - tosh
https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm
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smabie
> Others say what APL needs is a little bit of Franglais, which in our terms
> is APLGOL. “If APL only had the while-statement, or the if-then-else, or the
> for-statement, it would become such a perfect language.” That’s ridiculous.
> And it’s silly to say that if APL had arrays of arrays, all of our troubles
> would disappears. In point of fact, what will happen is that the amount of
> troubles would just grow almost exponentially if that happened.

And it turns out that the troubles do not increase exponentially when you make
some concessions. I think kdb+/q is a great middle-ground between APL/J and
regular programming languages. Retains most of the good stuff, but is simpler
to learn (no rank), and can be used in a functional or imperative style if
desired.

One day, I think we'll realize that we're on the wrong path, and array
languages will reign supreme. Until then I guess I'll have to suck it up and
resign myself in dealing with the huge and inefficient monstrosities we
software developers have created.

~~~
andrewnc
I do love array based languages, I think we see numpy/pytorch/jax filling that
space.

Maybe Empirical or Pure can take some of the spotlight

------
dang
If curious see also

2018 (4 comments)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640451)

2011 (1 comment)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3411646)

