My first language back in 1970, then if you wanted to 'program' you had a choice, punch cards and use ASM or Cobol/Fortran, or use a selectric typewriter and do APL.
APL is a natural language for those who love math, however without the correct keyboard with APL fonts labeled on the keyboard I would think it to all be tedious. In 1986 there were some companys selling APL for IBM-PC's, and the SW included some stickers you could apply to your keyboard so you could know where to type the APL characters.
Most of the APL variants I saw on UNIX 1980-2000, used a terrible encoding system for using the APL font.
APL in many ways is like PYTHON of today, fast and powerful, back in the day even Tektronix offered a graphics terminal ( 1970 ) that let you code APL and generate graphics instantly not unlike what you can do today. The nice thing about APL is that all types and maxtrix/scalar/vector op's are taken care for you, you never had to worry about types.
In many way's APL with the proper keyboard is much better that what we have had ever since.
Around the Wheel we go as they used to say. Not unlike a hamster in a cage.
Well, you still have it. GNU APL is there, and you really don't need a dedicated keyboard. It didn't take me long to learn the layout, and the Emacs mode provides a shortcut that pops up a picture of it to help you learn.
Also, all modern APL implementations use Unicode, which contains all the APL characters so there is no need to mess with special fonts something like that.
APL is a natural language for those who love math, however without the correct keyboard with APL fonts labeled on the keyboard I would think it to all be tedious. In 1986 there were some companys selling APL for IBM-PC's, and the SW included some stickers you could apply to your keyboard so you could know where to type the APL characters.
Most of the APL variants I saw on UNIX 1980-2000, used a terrible encoding system for using the APL font.
APL in many ways is like PYTHON of today, fast and powerful, back in the day even Tektronix offered a graphics terminal ( 1970 ) that let you code APL and generate graphics instantly not unlike what you can do today. The nice thing about APL is that all types and maxtrix/scalar/vector op's are taken care for you, you never had to worry about types.
In many way's APL with the proper keyboard is much better that what we have had ever since.
Around the Wheel we go as they used to say. Not unlike a hamster in a cage.