Brian Cantrill interviewed Arthur Whitney for the ACM Queue in 2009[1]: > BC You had used APL, and then you explored these other languages—Prolog variants and

Brian Cantrill interviewed Arthur Whitney for the ACM Queue in 2009[1]: > BC You had used APL, and then you explored these other languages—Prolog variants and so on—but when you got to Morgan Stanley you came back to APL. What brought you back? > AW I much preferred implementing and coding in LISP, but once I was dealing with big data sets and then having to do fairly simple calculations, APL just seemed to have the better vocabulary. > It had to come up one level. Common LISP even then had about 2,000 primitives. I didn't like that. What I liked was the original LISP, which had car, cdr, cons, and cond, but that was too little. Common LISP was way too big, but a stripped-down version of APL was in the middle with about 50 operations. It's about the same size as C. But the thing about the languages that I implement is that there are no libraries: those 50 operations are it. Everybody builds from there, and the resulting programs are extremely short. [1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242