[oskarth]

Would be really interesting to read a write up on your experience. What do you program in now? How do you look at other PLs now? What do you miss and what are you happy "just works"? What do you think other PLs (especially languages like Lisp, which are very high in terseness) can learn from Q?

[avmich]

I would compare Q (and other APL-related languages) to Vim editor. There you have some carefully chosen operations which are easy to perform. They don't take much efforts. They are also easy to compose in useful ways - because the corresponding properties support that. Since the basis of editing operations is fairly large, you have many operations; but when you know many of them, you can work powerful edits.

Lisp on the other hand is more like Emacs - naturally. Here we have a small, carefully chosen orthogonal basis of abstract operations - not domain-specific, but "theoretically-foundational" small basis. Then you have a library of macros on top of that, and ability, of course, to extend.

In other words, basis for APL is "classical" math, made executable and expanded with mechanisms required to put in one line programming constructs (logic, control flow, ordering...). It's harder to expand, but you don't often need that. Lisp is a specific branch of math, lambda calculus, which is provably enough to solve arbitrary programming problem. The "inner core" of Lisp is also hard to expand, but what you expand for your task is "the usage" of the language, which is made to be straightforwardly expandable.

To me it's hard to say what is better.