zlacker

>>mafaa+(OP)
This is Kenneth Iverson's 1979 Turing Award lecture.

>>azhenl+m
Yes. There are some deep insights in this exposition. The irony is (in my opinion) APL is the worst Array/Matrix based programming language. In fairness it was also the first, but compared to Matlab or Julia it is not as expressive and feels much harder to use.

>>blulul+Fa
There's a certain mathematical elegance to APL, I think. When the language is terse enough it helps you visualize and work with the language as a tool of thought--Matlab attempts to map actual mathematics to ASCII which is not that successful for me at least, since it meets a middle ground where it's too difficult for me to think quickly purely in Matlab and it's too high level for it to be useful as a practical language.

Engineers love it for prototyping, though, so maybe I just haven't worked with Matlab enough.

>>soline+Gb
Fair point - personally I found APL to be a little too terse to be readable in ASCII. I think that there is a big difference in the affordances of a chalkboard/paper and a monospaced text editor, and to me APL is too close to paper based notation where it is easy to read and write a larger set of symbols. Matlab has some dedicated notation around matrices but uses more text heavy descriptions beyond that which feels better suited to a command line. Julia takes an even more text based approach and supports notations like list comprehensions which feel easier to learn, read and use than a set glyphs.