On Thu, 2 May 2024 at 00:51, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > What would our world be like if the first home computers were to have had > APL, instead of BASIC?
To be perfectly honest I think the home computer boom wouldn't have happened, and it would have crashed and burned in the 1970s, with the result that microcomputers remained firmly under corporate control. I have been watching the APL world with interest since I discovered it at university, and I still don't understand a word of it. I've been watching Lisp for just 15 years or so and I find it unreadable too. I think there are widely different levels of mental flexibility among smart humans and one person's "this just requires a small effort but you get so much in return!" is someone else's eternally impossible, unclimbable mountain. After some 40 years in computers now, I still like BASIC best, with Fortran and Pascal very distant runners-up and everything else from C to Python is basically somewhere between Minoan Linear A and Linear B to me. I think I lack the mental flexibility, and I think I'm better than most of hoi polloi. If the early machines had used something cryptic like APL or Forth I reckon we'd never have had a generation of child programmers. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053
