APL contains some genuinely new ideas worth learning. I'd suggest looking into J, as a more accessible and modern APL dialect. (K / Q is also really, really coo

APL contains some genuinely new ideas worth learning. I'd suggest looking into J, as a more accessible and modern APL dialect. (K / Q is also really, really cool, but J is less commercially restricted.) I was just curious because it was so different, but the thing that really convinced me was going through some of the J "labs" (a bunch of math lessons included with J, that incidentally teach it along the way) and spending a couple hours picking apart this code (http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm) to get into the APL frame of mind. I would suggest not getting too hung up on the syntax, and instead focusing on the pros and cons of doing everything over collections by default, with implicit looping. "Thinking big", as Henry Rich calls it in _J for C Programmers_ (also a good resource). The ideogram-based syntax is an historical thing, and getting fixated on that is like thinking the only novel thing about Lisp is all the parens. See also: "The World's Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment" (http://prog21.dadgum.com/48.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/48.html)