3 ms·

You are right on many points. When I was using APL professionally I did not think of the symbols at all. They were part of my language. That’s what Iverson m

You are right on many points. When I was using APL professionally I did not think of the symbols at all. They were part of my language. That’s what Iverson meant when he called it a tool for thought. No different from using musical or mathematical notation. In all cases one does not reach that level of “flow” with notation through casual contact. Most people who complain about APL’s notation have only had casual contact with it. That isn’t a valid frame of reference at all.

tluyben2 4y ago
To be honest, this notational tool of thought feeling I really don't have with any of the popular languages. It is indeed like a natural language you are learning or one you are fluent in; when you are learning you have to translate to your native language all the time; when you are fluent, it just flows. That's the difference. I used to have it with Basic, C and Pascal, but never as much as with apl/k. Even those are recent for me. I had it with Prolog in university doing a major tract in symbolic NLP (my natural speech and dreams sometimes where in Prolog; that when talking with someone, I would actually just for clauses automatically). I find, personally, that joy of programming is vastly less using libraries than it is just having a fixed amount of functions and stdlib you know by hard and get fluent at. But did you see / try BQN? I think it's an interesting attempt. And well built.
harperlee 4y ago
As an outsider, I am now wondering about how cool would an APL variant be, where you composed new words based in a set of out of the box syllables! Haha