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A comment on APL deserves its Renaissance too. Parent comment

Re:APL deserves its Renaissance too by mlochbaum on Thursday November 17, 2022 @10:47AM (#33640596)
APL is pretty big on immutability and pure functions too. Arrays are immutable, period, and the link below has John Scholes talking about the advantages of declarative programming back in 2005. And, uh, yes, APL tells you where the error is when you get one. It's pretty obvious you've bounced off due to a surface-level dislike for the syntax and are guessing about any other features it may have.

https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/documents/Papers/declarative_...

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Re:APL deserves its Renaissance too by gjulianm on Thursday November 17, 2022 @11:06AM (#33640893)
> It's pretty obvious you've bounced off due to a surface-level dislike for the syntax and are guessing about any other features it may have.

I'm not saying APL doesn't have those features. I'm making examples of languages that have a clear value proposition. If APL is big on immutability and pure functions, then why use APL vs, say, Haskell or Clojure? Same with the "where is the error thing", I was explaining why maintenance isn't just a "depends on who maintains it" thing, in fact the example languages were assembly and Python, nothing to do with APL.

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Re:APL deserves its Renaissance too by mlochbaum on Thursday November 17, 2022 @11:17AM (#33641072)
I've talked to plenty of people whose eyes light up when you tell them 5 + 1 2 3 just works in the language. What you're saying is that you didn't find APL's value proposition attractive, and this is a fact about you, not APL.
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Re:APL deserves its Renaissance too by gjulianm on Thursday November 17, 2022 @11:54AM (#33641739)
> I've talked to plenty of people whose eyes light up when you tell them 5 + 1 2 3 just works in the language.

This is literally "people who like it say they like it". It's like saying that the value proposition of Python is having list comprehension, when that's just syntactic sugar.

And no, it's not just me, you just have to take a look at the comments or even the OP. The only point being made is that it has very powerful array programming primitives, but those functions can be easily brought to other languages (and indeed a lot of them have those primitives).

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