Re: APL & Programming Concepts

Food for thought indeed Pierre.

"... and it's only a bunch of guys with gray hair that are your
customers, I would be very scary if I was a shareholder of that
company."

It is equally scary to ponder the fact that APL may not leave any
legacy beyond the bunch of guys with grey hair. The problem solving
capabilities of APL are clear. I do not have any background in
teaching so I cannot formalise an approach to APL based on stylised
thinking i.e. programming concepts first and then to illustrate how
APL delivers.

Something occured to me: one of the criticisms levelled at APL is the
lack of support for data types, which is integral as a programming
concept. However, JavaScript does not have declarative data types and
C# 3.0 introduces anonymous types: in essence you declare your
variables and the compiler infers the data type. APL does it the same
way (albeit it does not have dates as such and does not compile).

Have you done much with Visual APL? I spent a lot of time with it and
I believe it is a great product and hope that the marketing is equally
good. I am waiting for the next Express version (VS2008). Perhaps it
is the future since it delivers APL from the best known IDE the
industry has.