APL

[Ben Kenobi]

Spinning off from the CP/M thread tangent . . . .

When I started back in the mid-80's, one of the first things they had me do was to learn APL. Now APL knowledge is limited to a few geeks and we're trying to phase it out entirely.

[oldgirl]

I use to know APL. Haven't programmed in that in over 7 years. Kinda neat language though.

I was going to try and learn VBA but still haven't found the time. What language do you think is worth learning in the long run?

[42]

Wait a minute, Obi. Maybe we shouldn't phase it out. If these young'ns don't know anything about it, we dinosaurs could become a hot commodity, especially if another Y2K crisis ever came along. Something to supplement our retirement income. (The reading right to left thing almost ensures that nobody in their right mind would want to learn it today if they don't have to.)

[Ben Kenobi]

And no order of precedence in evaluation, either. Kenneth Iverson has a lot to answer for. (<- I think . . . .)

[E. Blackadder]

back to front! What could be more natural...

[kazh]

Alas, Poor Linguist, I knew it well. :P

[Ben Kenobi]

The results are about what I expected--when spreadsheets really started kicking in, the need to know APL dropped fast.

[Jack]

I started working in '88 but never learned APL. We started out using Fortran as our modeling language and FOCUS as our database. There was a gradual move to C but some guys became heavy Perl users.

Now I use VB and Access. VB is fun but Access is so slow it's nauseating.

[Quasi]

I haven't seen APL for years but used to love it. Tough to fix someone else's code though.....

[42]

Amen! Don'tcha just love it when you run across code where somebody has "found a really neat way of condensing 1000 lines of code into just 2 lines", but they've left the company so they can't explain how those two lines work?