APL is more French than English (1978)

http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm

by blasdel • 15 years ago

5 1 15 years ago

vorg• 15 years ago

> "What attracted me, then, to APL was a feeling that perhaps through APL one might begin to acquire some of the dimensions in programming that we revere in natural language — some of the pleasures of composition; of saying things elegantly; of being brief, poetic, artistic, that makes our natural languages so precious to us. That aspect of programming was one that I’ve long been interested in but have never found any lever for coming close to in my experience with languages of the FORTRAN, ALGOL, PL/I school. It was clear in those languages that programming was really an exercise in plumbing."

This quote by Perlis from the article sounds eerily similar to some of the stuff written about Lisp over the last decade. Perhaps there's something to be gained by combining the concepts of Lisp/Scheme/Clojure and APL/K/J together. Of course there's the problem of entering all those APL symbols, but surely that's solvable.

APL is more French than English (1978)

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