| One of the most powerful aspects of APL is its notation. Ken Iverson himself wrote a paper titled "Notation as a Tool For Thought". Here it is: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pd... I remember watching Iverson deliver a presentation in person about this very topic. Anyone familiar with fields such as mathematics or music understands the power of notation. The integral symbol conveys information and allows you to think about the problem rather than the mechanics. APL in early times suffered from a unique problem: You had to physically modify your computer and printer to be able to do APL. You had to remove and replace the character generator ROM from you graphics card (who remembers those cards?). You had to get a new keyboard or put stickers all over your standard keyboard. And you had to change the print wheel or print ball (IBM printers) to be able to see, type and print APL characters. It was a pain in the ass. Only the most interested cult members endured that level of pain for an extended period of time. Years later Iverson decided to transliterate APL symbols into combinations of standard ASCII characters. This was a knee-jerk reaction to the above stated problem. What he did not have was the vision to recognize that technology would take care of this on its own. Not long after the introduction of J everyone could display and print graphics of any kind. The APL character set, the symbols, ceased to be a problem in that regard. Iverson took the wrong road with J out of --conjecture on my part-- commercial interest rather than language interest. He violated something he personally talked about: The value of notation as a tool for thought. J doesn't need to exist. If we are to evolve APL and move into a world where symbolic programming is a reality (something I think would be very powerful) we need to move away from typing ASCII characters into a keyboard and move into a paradigm where advanced software engineering has it's own notation that can be used to describe problems and create solutions with the kind of expressive power we have not seen in mainstream computing in years. |