As I like to put it when I have to come up with a “fun fact” for corporate icebreaker activities, “I have programmed in APL for money”. It’s not really that har

As I like to put it when I have to come up with a “fun fact” for corporate icebreaker activities, “I have programmed in APL for money”. It’s not really that hard. The notation is certainly a stumbling block if you’re trying to read these articles out of context. How do you even “read” something like “5⍴⍳20” in your head when it’s that unfamiliar? But that’s the same as anything else, what does “for (x = 0; x < 10; i++)” mean to someone who’s never seen it before? So when you can see that as “5 rho iota 20”, at least you can pronounce it. But when you’re actively using the language you know what ⍳20 means as easily as you know what “1 through 20” means. “Reshape 5” is just as familiar. So it takes only a glance at 5⍴⍳20 to visualize a 5x4 matrix of the numbers from 1 to 20. Once you start thinking that way, the majority of what might seem like show-off tricks or being clever are just the paradigm of the language. The idea of creating a vector of things, applying a true/false test to every element to create another vector of 1s and 0s, and summing those or using them to pick elements out of another vector is a super powerful tool that lets you express a lot of ideas in a compact form that describes the algorithm without getting bogged down in writing explicit loops. What’s the average of these numbers? The sum divided by the count. In APL you just write that down. In many other languages, you write “I wish to declare a variable ‘i’ of type 32-bit-integer. Set ‘i’ to 0. Compare ‘i’ to ...”. What does any of this have to do with an average? Now of course in an article where the author is actually showing off how clever you can get, and the topic of many items is some obscure mathematical concept, it’s going to be harder to read than the average program.