I'm fascinated by APL but man is it hard to get used to. I keep waiting for someone to build something like APL but sufficiently modernized as to actually be useful to me :)
APL is a language that confuses the hell out of me, and I hate that. I wish there was more guidance online to using it, since I find the paradigm to be very interesting.
I'm not sure if everyone who's interested knows APL... I was initially interested, but honestly a bit less when I saw the compiler is in APL. Still a very impressive feat, just not my cup of tea.
APL is an awesome language with one glaring flaw. It's impossible to read and you need a special input method to type. I enjoy reading about it but I can't imagine I'd ever enjoy having to work with it.
APL is a wonderfully imaginative language. But - it is difficult to decipher, and I would imagine rather difficult to debug. (Not to mention requiring a specialty keyboard...)
I have, indeed. I studied APL at school (which shows you how old I am!) I enjoyed reading it and hated typing it :-) I tend to prefer things that are a little bit in between. APL has quite a lot of unusual features, though (some of which were intuitive for me, having been a FORTH programmer, and some of which were not -- having a pretty poor math background). I've been thinking of playing with one of the modern APL variants. I think I would really enjoy it these days.
APL looks like the best programming language I've ever seen. I wish it could be extended with SQL and web-service mappings to input-output data conveniently and to use functions written in other languages (like C and Python) for acceleration and rapid logic prototyping.
I had to use APL once back in the 1970's, because I needed the graphics capabilities of an IBM 5100. I managed, but it wasn't a pleasant experience and I've felt no compulsion to repeat it.
I admit it was kind of cool to be able to operate on whole arrays at a time, but nowadays I can do that with Python's numpy.
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