I think he came to the wrong conclusion. We shouldn't be looking at APL or J to see what they did right ( surprisingly little ) we should be focusing on how they failed and making sure we don't fail the same way. Yeah an APL master might be able to crunch numbers much better then the average Java programmer, but in reality I can get more number crunching implemented by spinning up an R based development team then I would ever get done trying to find, train, and pay an APL based team.
Your statement validates his statement. Just because R-based development teams are in number, does not make quality, and vice versa: APL or J programmers may be lower in numbers, but you may be getting better quality.
The catapult was invented, and then forgotten, and had to be re-invented. In today's age with the internet, and the relatively short span of computer science, I must say I agree that the short-sightedness seems worse.
I play with APL/J and I like Julia and Haskell. To me J (APL) are close to the succinctness and expressiveness of mathematical formula, and they work naturally with arrays, no batteries needed.
It sounds like you both have this ideal of quality that theoretical quality counts for something, even expressed quality doesn't really matter that much if you can't bring _quantity_ to bear.
What did APL and co get wrong, except for becoming popular (otherwise it is just an argument from popularity).
The ultra terse syntax, will have lead to an extreme learning curve. But if you replaced it with more typical function names, I doubt it would have made history different/
APL and co got becoming popular wrong. As great as a singular developer might be they will never make the comunalative progress that a much larger number of acceptable developers will make.
The software ecosystem evoloved so rapidly around APL that it didn't have time to really show off anything it was good at. All the problems that it solved were solved 100 times over by others, and they gained the market share to drive the state of the art forward. Sure Kdb might be great, but there is a reason why Oracle makes a few more orders of magnitude more money then they do, even the claim that they can replicate Hadoop and other "Big Data" solutions is nonense as even a modest Hadoop consulting firm does more buisness then the 10m that Kx brings in.
The failure is one I have seen a lot. It doesn't matter what you do, if you are living on an island as a professional of any kind your contributions will be shortly forgotten and replaced by those who had the ability to share their ideas with the larger population.
