I'll throw in a comment/story that is mostly true. I was hired at a large
company many years ago. One of my assignments was to eliminate APL usage, which
was seen as overly expensive and not in the preferred company direction. At the
time, APL was probably the most widely used language in the company.
I succeeded in my assignment to eliminate APL after many decades of work in
2007. I suspect that there were pockets of continuing APL usage via the PC
versions of APL (or J).
There are many reasons why APL was so difficult to eliminate. In my opinion,
these are mostly the same reasons that led to APL being, from many points of
view, one of the most important computer languages and implementation
environments in this company for many years.
From what I saw of the adoption and later decline of APL usage, the APL symbols
were fairly far down on the list of the reasons for or against the usage of APL
at this company.
In a way, this current discussion of symbology reminds me of the internecine
battles in the past over the theoretical correctness of various implementations
of enclosure.
I will say my reasons for using both APL and J (and the dozen or so other
languages I use regularly) have not much to do with their usage of symbolics or
keywords. After learning the first few dozen languages, I find that these
differences are not very important to me.
On 4/11/2013 14:56, Björn Helgason wrote:
On Apr 11, 2013 5:47 PM, "Joey K Tuttle" <[email protected]> wrote:
I have been tempted, several times, to make one comment and that is a
feeling that the APL character set was perhaps the single most important
reason for lack of widespread acceptance and use of APL...
I believe you are right.
PS: A comment like that to c.l.a would not be popular.
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