I (partially and badly) learned APL while in high school in the mid-'70s, mostly because I liked being perceived as a weirdo with reams of pages bearing symbols nobody else could decipher. (If you're going to be different and noticed, might as well make a party of it, right?)
Much later, I found myself working with Lotus Notes as part of my programming duties. The main programming facility, Formula Language (a macro language that looked a lot like 1-2-3's cell formulas) had no loops (at the time; they've been added since) and only a hybrid if/switch construct for control. WTF? It took quite a while by my time scale, but I eventually realised that it was a conceptual descendant of APL, but with odd language tokens (in that you could actually read them). Once I relaxed into "everything's an array, and all operations are array-wise" mode, I was continually amazed at how much I could do how quickly with how little code.
When the paradigm is right, it's right. But when it's wrong...
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I (partially and badly) learned APL while in high school in the mid-'70s, mostly because I liked being perceived as a weirdo with reams of pages bearing symbols nobody else could decipher. (If you're going to be different and noticed, might as well make a party of it, right?)
Much later, I found myself working with Lotus Notes as part of my programming duties. The main programming facility, Formula Language (a macro language that looked a lot like 1-2-3's cell formulas) had no loops (at the time; they've been added since) and only a hybrid if/switch construct for control. WTF? It took quite a while by my time scale, but I eventually realised that it was a conceptual descendant of APL, but with odd language tokens (in that you could actually read them). Once I relaxed into "everything's an array, and all operations are array-wise" mode, I was continually amazed at how much I could do how quickly with how little code.
When the paradigm is right, it's right. But when it's wrong...