APL was the first language I learned after IBM 360 Assembly in the 1970s while I was in college. I really liked it because I was a math major and it was extremely well-suited to math operations on arrays. I used it for finding objects on the 2D complex number plane for my Senior Thesis.
I really enjoyed creating clever combinations of the APL operators to get a ton of computation done in one line of code. However, this was the epitome of "read-only code". It was very difficult to read that kind of code after writing it.
After college I never used APL again, although I worked as a software developer (and still do). I miss the fun I had with it, but I wouldn't want to use it for code that I or anyone else would have to maintain, and I doubt that it would be a very expressive language for most commercial applications. For mathematical, array-oriented tasks, Python has appropriate libraries that would probably lead to more maintainable code. And of course there's Julia.
But I can imagine some people still having the expertise to use APL for exploratory calculations, enjoyably and more productively than any other language.
Comments
APL was the first language I learned after IBM 360 Assembly in the 1970s while I was in college. I really liked it because I was a math major and it was extremely well-suited to math operations on arrays. I used it for finding objects on the 2D complex number plane for my Senior Thesis.
I really enjoyed creating clever combinations of the APL operators to get a ton of computation done in one line of code. However, this was the epitome of "read-only code". It was very difficult to read that kind of code after writing it.
After college I never used APL again, although I worked as a software developer (and still do). I miss the fun I had with it, but I wouldn't want to use it for code that I or anyone else would have to maintain, and I doubt that it would be a very expressive language for most commercial applications. For mathematical, array-oriented tasks, Python has appropriate libraries that would probably lead to more maintainable code. And of course there's Julia.
But I can imagine some people still having the expertise to use APL for exploratory calculations, enjoyably and more productively than any other language.