A deep dive into APL
I am blown away to see how frequently APL seems to come up on HN these days, a language I used professionally for over ten years.<p>As much as I love it I have to say one of the issues with APL is that it was way ahead of it&#x27;s time.  Because of that it struggled to run on computers of that era.<p>I was introduced to the language in 1982~ish.  Like I said, I used it extensively, attended and presented at APL conferences and even have a picture of my younger and dorkier self with Ken Iverson (creator of APL).<p>This struggle to run on hardware that could not handle the huge expansions and contractions of memory utilization inherent in the way APL works multidimensional data sets like putty meant it could not compete where other languages had no issues at all.  On PC&#x27;s you were limited to 640K of RAM.  It would be years before you could have enough memory to almost not care about utilization.<p>As the language didn&#x27;t really catch the attention of the CS masses it failed to evolve as it could have over the years.  And this is the reason I would suggest today it is not much more than a curiosity.<p>I&#x27;m sure there are some out there using it professionally.  If I were to guess i&#x27;d say it must be mostly companies with a significant installed based of APL software they don&#x27;t dare try to rewrite.<p>I firmly believe that the future of computing has to be in an APL-like language.  By this I mean that we need to evolve to a notation for computing, rather than text for computing.  Iverson himself wrote an excellent paper titled &quot;Notation as a Tool for Thought&quot;.<p>The issue is that in order to evolve APL one has to have a deep understanding of APL.  And, frankly, there are but a few of us around who have that understanding.  Not sure how many of this group would embark on the mission to create a true next-generation APL worthy of it&#x27;s lineage.<p>I read and I smile every time I see the language come up on HN.  I taught my kids some APL and they are always blown away by it.  Not sure where to go from here.