I used APL professionally for ten years. The only high-brow APL’ers I ever came across did almost nothing outside of APL.

I love the language but it is, in my opinion, not much more than an academically interesting paradigm now. I agree that every programmer should have non-trivial exposure to these ideas (also Forth and Assembly). And then they should move on.

The language stopped evolving some 20 to 30 years ago. Frankly, I am perplexed as to why it pops-up on HN so much.

The language is more relevant than ever, especially with things like the D programming language (not 'WalterBright's thing, John Scholes's thing). Have you seen co-dfns?

Co-dfns is interesting because I think it is the first compiler that has ever been written in a fully data-parallel style. But why does that make APL as a language particularly relevant, except that it was the implementation language?

I hesitate to answer this because I feel like 'arcfide's explained this much better than I can in one of his talks so maybe he'll see this and can point you to it, but if there's no response by the time I wake up tomorrow I'll give a detailed explanation on my views on this.

I'd love to hear your views, regardless of whether you can find arcfide's.