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There were many 'normal programming languages' of APL times. But not so many of them are still around - Lisp with 'no syntax! so many brackets!' and APL with 'a
by snaky 8y ago
There were many 'normal programming languages' of APL times. But not so many of them are still around - Lisp with 'no syntax! so many brackets!' and APL with 'arbitrary symbols', Prolog, Smalltalk - what else? All of them are special, and maybe that's not a coincidence.
- IshKebab 8y agoFortran predated APL by 5 years and that had actual function names (even if they were limited to 5 characters to fit on punch cards). I'm not sure what your point is.
- avmich 8y agoRead Notation as a Tool of Thought for reasons why APL looks the way it looks. It's a pretty common idea "let's rename all those ugly APL primitives with descriptive names". And it's easy to do. Why do you think the idea doesn't stick in APL, even though it works in say Matlab? Maybe it is because for APL programmers \. is perceived on the same level as + and you don't ask to rename + to 'plus'.
- snaky 8y agoFortran is not around for long time. Fortran code is still around, but almost nobody write new code in Fortran nowadays.