Computer programming for fun and profit

[anon32019413]

@Michael_Black

I remember when some people in Byte wanted an IBM Selectric typeball for APL, figuring if they got X number of people it would cost a reasonable Y amount per ball.

That indicated to me that APL was a “hot” language, though I’ve later read it was “easy to code, hard to read” or something like that.

APL was cool because many operations got their own nifty symbol. I mean mathematics has a bunch of weird symbols and gets new symbols all the time. From that I see that there is a certain logic to using more than just the Latin alphabet and a handful of symbols present in ASCII. On the other hand having a normal keyboard where I can easily touch type makes COBOL rather nicer than APL.