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
“Engineers love it for prototyping, though”

Makes perfect sense. Matlab is for engineers, not for mathematicians. They use computer algebra systems, proof assistants, etc. Difference is that engineers (and physicists) want answers and don’t care about how they are obtained, while its the reverse for mathematicians.

I think APL, although it, too, is a language for computing numbers, spiritually is a bit closer to mathematics than Matlab.

>>Someon+0M
I'm a bit of both, so I guess I take the radical approach--straight from mathematics to C++/ASM/FPGA/ASIC. Ultimately programming languages are just an alternate notative system for mathematics--formal language theory actually formalizes and generalizes this, it's what us Computer Scientist's specialize in generally.

Since the computer is just a glorified calculator with memory (sorry Apple), we can fit the whole thing into a formal mathematical framework.