Speaking from experience, I have been in an independent consultant in
(mostly) APL for over 20 years, and have known APL for over 30. I was
sold on APL the day my three page Fortran struggle turned into just
over 10 lines of code, plus the idea that I could now "plot" (crudely,
at the time, but still many blight years ahead the other blighters) my
data with nearly zero effort and an equivalent number of keystrokes.
I started my business in 1984. A good omen, it was. But with very
few exceptions, most of my work was "maintenance programming", and
there was some sort of new, improved, replacement system on the
horizon, to be written in whatever programming language was in fashion
or in mainstream at the time. Even in my previous life at the
timesharing company, APL usage was often very temporary, either the
inhouse computer was full up, or the client was prototyping something,
getting it in production on the mainframe while a team of Cobol slugs
were writing the real application.
And to be perfectly honest, as these were my clients, I did not ever
try to talk them out of it - "Resistance was useless", to paraphrase
one young Vogon. However, this gave me a wonderful opportunity to
learn some of the other stuff out there. With one client, I learned
PC-Express, with another, Smalltalk, and with yet another, Matlab.
Granted two out of three of these technologies are pushing up daisies,
I still made some money and learned something.
If you were to find an APL job today, it would most likely be in
conjunction with a migration to some other technology, most
likely .Net or Java. My suggestion is to learn this garbage, become
good at it, then concentrate on finding the .Net/Java jobs with or
without the APL migration. VB, C#, and Java are practically the same
(execrable) language. Spend some money on a couple of good books,
then download the stuff from the Hinternet. Download the various
Express Editions for VB, C#, C++, and even Java or J+ or whatever they
call it. Download Eclipse, get the latest version of Java from Sun,
find out what a Swing is or what Struts are. The technology is, well,
underwhelming, but it beats cleaning toilets. None of these will ever
beat APL for sheer expressive power, but at least you are in a vantage
point to see what's coming next.
Sadly, most APL migrations these days appear to be happening for the
wrong reasons. It doesn't look as if APL vendor stability is a
problem, rather it often happens for someone's personal glory or
business hobby ("I want to learn VB", spoken in George Carlin's voice)
or plain old corporate intrigue. It is rarely in the interest of the
application or users to do it, but it gets done. And, normally using
a magic wand, the migration is pronounced a success.
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