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Remember the Palm Pilot? Drawing the ASCII-ish symbols in the little box? While I did memorize the strokes, I never found the process efficient. I don't think that drawing APL runes would be any better -- certainly not better than the key-combos of Dyalog's bespoke APL editor (free for personal use, BTW).



Wow, actually I do remember that, and it sucked!

So, I've never written apl, and I'm glad I read this comment because that's an excellent point you raise.

To expand a bit, I was thinking about being able to notate computation graphically. That's really what I want. Visual programming has existed and has sucked forever, but those thoughts don't go away that there might be a way to do it, if I just had the missing piece.

I need to sit down with dyalog and find out what I'm missing, it sounds like.

Thanks!


To be fair, ownning an iPad Pro, I can say first hand that the handwriting recognition possible with the stylus is actually quite remarkable and a great improvement from the old palm-pilot days.


With that new interface, could you see yourself jotting down a "sentence" of APL that maybe you think of in a meeting or something?

I mainly am interested in apl as a notation, there's a certain lispy zen to a language that unifies notation and code into the same thing.

Maybe there are better handwriting notations to explore for what I'm thinking.


https://www.sacrideo.us/paper-is-dead-long-live-paper-progra...

I think one thing to consider would be actually using paper. The terseness means you don't really pay a 'retyping' penalty.


> With that new interface, could you see yourself jotting down a "sentence" of APL that maybe you think of in a meeting or something?

If you've got an Android device you could give MyScript Calculator a go, if writing APL was as easy as writing equations on that app then it would be a lovely experience.




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