> What’s happened, of course, with FORTRAN is that it has become the lingua franca of the computing world. It is the one language that everybody understands to some level of detail — it is on every computer, in every country, made by every manufacturer — and one could learn to use FORTRAN reading books at every level of complexity, written in every language on the surface of the earth. It is universal, like the air we breathe, and I don’t think it’s going to be displaced for a long time to come.

"I met a traveler from an antique land..."

  > What Made Lisp Different:
  > 1. Conditionals (if-then-else construct)
  > 2. A function type (functions as first class objects)
  > 3. Recursion
  > 4. A new concept of variables (dynamic typing and pass-by-pointer)
  > 5. Garbage-collection

This is a good article to understand the thinking behind array languages in general, and APL in particular.

However, I disagree with some points made. In particular, this one:

> Some people say the most important issue at hand is to improve the data structures of APL. Others say what APL needs is a little bit of Franglais, which in our terms is APLGOL. “If APL only had the while-statement, or the if-then-else, or the for-statement, it would become such a perfect language.” That’s ridiculous. And it’s silly to say that if APL had arrays of arrays, all of our troubles would disappears. In point of fact, what will happen is that the amount of troubles would just grow almost exponentially if that happened.

This turned out to be untrue. And the resistance in the community to do this is partly what lead to its loss of popularity.

Modern array languages, and indeed most APL implementations, have these things and they did not create troubles. In fact, it made them practical and easier to learn, because it allows users to use the style that suits the problem at hand the best. And in some cases, a pure array solution is just not appropriate.

For context :

> Transcription of a talk given by Professor Perlis at the APL’78 Conference held at Foothill College, Los Altos, CA. on 1978-03-29.

Reading this as a French is also a little bit funny because in France "APL" stands for primarily: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aide_au_logement

:3

Explains why I love R so much. Once you throw out ambitions to be a "spherical language" (love that phrase) and pretensions to some austere, impersonal beauty, APL-likes grow their own kind of beauty. Instead of PHP's fractal of badness which grows from the language itself, APL and R and friends grow fractals of badness from us, the humans, as kernels.