bwanab

I recently did a project using Dyalog APL. I really wanted to love it.

On the pro side, the community was great and I loved the language, but only to a point. There are way too many instances of utter astonishment at behaviors that seemed to be just how the language works. I had a lot of trouble finding good, mature libraries for things I’ve taken for granted in other languages.

I’ve found that Julia provides 98% of the Array Programming value in a modern “batteries included” package.

phantomics
As an array language developer I may be a bit heretical in the community for my view that array languages are a domain-specific tool, not a general-purpose tool. They are the best by far in their niche of working with arrays, but they can be harder to fit to some other kinds of tasks, especially when it comes to more semantic programming.

That's why my APL compiler, April (https://github.com/phantomics/april), can be called within Common Lisp with CL data structures as its input and output. It's also trivial to port functions from CL and its libraries into an April workspace. You can see an example on page 2 of this paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6381963

In this way April puts the entire CL ecosystem at your fingertips. If you want to do something like making HTTP requests or ingesting XML files, you can write a function to do it and express the specific parameters for your use case in CL, and then have the function available within April using a simple monadic/dyadic argument API. This can sidestep the need to port every necessary library into APL itself.