[Gravityloss]

I understand that. I still don't want to spend the effort to learn APL.

It's like digital cameras that came around. Many users knew how to use film cameras so you made the digital cameras to be mostly like film cameras even if the digital medium would have enabled a very different, much better camera straight out of the box. But the market had invested so much time in this learning how to work with film that you had to do it like that. Path dependency is not just about rigid thinking, it's about using what you have because that saves a lot of resources.

Regarding, .map being all wrong, in Ruby it's not a property of an array, it's a method for enumerables. Array is one type of enumerable, but it works with hashmaps etc. https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.6.5/Enumerable.html So it's not that non-general. It is noisy (and weird with the pipes) because it's general.

[PeCaN]

To be honest I don't really see people who don't want to learn APL being that interested in putting in the effort to completely upend how they think about programming and algorithms in order to use other array languages, regardless of syntax. (After all this is by far the hardest part of learning APL, the symbols are easy enough and easy to look up anyway.)

map is general in kind of the wrong way. You could after all add a #map method to Object for scalars and make a Matrix class that also implements it and then just call map everywhere. However you still run into the problem, mentioned in the video, that it doesn't easily generalize to x + y where both x and y are arrays; you have to use zip or map2 or something (and now you still have to figure out how to do vector + matrix) and yes you can kind of do explicit "array programming" in Ruby if for some reason you're really compelled to do that but it will look awful. And that's just what array languages do for you implicitly. As a paradigm there's a bit more too it than "just call map everywhere"—there's still all the functions for expressing algorithms as computations on arrays.