APL was actually the first real programming language I learned, 35 year ago! It was very cool and mind-bending, and has hugely influenced the way I think today. APL has also been hugely influential on the world, but after I learned Lisp, I'd never go back to APL. Though I do wish there were an APL embedded DSL for Lisp.
I wasn't aware that anyone still uses APL for anything real. Back when I used it, it didn't even have arrays of strings. Though you could make a twelve dimensional array of characters instead, for whatever that might be worth.
Dyalog is the most popular implementation; It's alive and kicking, can do COM and .NET on windows. Dyalog is closed source and proprietary.
There's also J http://jsoftware.com which is the APL's designer "fix all the deficiencies" iteration. It only uses ASCII characters, and takes APL to the extreme -- e.g., +/ % # (that is: plus-slash-percent-hash) is a complete unary function that computes averages. J is open source.
And there's also K, http://kx.com which is popular in the financial world. The relation is K:J like C:Ada, I think. Whereas J strives to be pure, and mathematically complete and extremely well defined and rounded, K throws away almost every language redundancy (e.g. it only has nested vectors, which are also used to represent matrices), and does everything to be superfast. In the latest revision of the language, K4, they incorporate a database into the language. There's an open source implementation of K3 called Kona which you can find on github.
I have a friend who's a quant at a large pension fund, and although they don't write any new APL applications, they still rely on and update existing APL applications.
Though I do wish there were an APL embedded DSL for Lisp.
I've been working on something like this in Racket, but I'm still exploring the design space (though I worry that I'll spend too much time doing this and never actually be satisfied with anything).
APL was actually the first real programming language I learned, 35 year ago! It was very cool and mind-bending, and has hugely influenced the way I think today. APL has also been hugely influential on the world, but after I learned Lisp, I'd never go back to APL. Though I do wish there were an APL embedded DSL for Lisp.
I wasn't aware that anyone still uses APL for anything real. Back when I used it, it didn't even have arrays of strings. Though you could make a twelve dimensional array of characters instead, for whatever that might be worth.