Yes, APL is Turing-complete, whereas SQL is not... until you consider vendor extensions. I guess I should have included the obligatory "I know that..." in the

Yes, APL is Turing-complete, whereas SQL is not... until you consider vendor extensions. I guess I should have included the obligatory "I know that..." in the original post. The fact remains that SQL allows you to do complicated queries without having a computer science degree, something I have never seen with APL/J/K, Java, or any other programming language. SQL arrived on the scene in 1974, by the way-- it's not a "21st century" anything. I agree that the JVM does not use memory well. For example, it has a high per-object memory overhead. And there are things such as lock widening which are a real design problem. But even considering these things, the JVM still manages to consistently beat other choices such as Perl, Python, Ruby, and so forth. Yes, vector instructions are great, and Java can't really use them. There are also other builtin instructions such as the CRC ones which would be nice to have at the language level. We have been adding JNI segments to make use of these. It isn't the syntax of loops that is the problem, but rather, the presence of side effects in the language, that makes auto-vectorization difficult. Probably annotations should be added to make this easier, like Intel has done for C/C++. None of this means that APL is going to come back. The scientists and engineers who originally used it back when 4kb was a lot of memory are just going to use R, MATLAB, Mathematica, or another choice like that and gain a lot of the same micro-optimizations you love. People who want to do big queries over giant data sets are going to keep using Hadoop. The one thing that could maybe dethrone Hadoop is a system that made use of GPUs (graphics processors). Some of them have 512 cores now-- that's a lot of power, and Java can't really harness it at all. But GPU processors are really restricted in how they can communicate and how much memory they can access, so it would not be as much of a general purpose solution.