There are a lot of comments of the type "it's unreadable/write-only/unmaintainable" here. It's a natural reaction; I know, I was there. It looks different. But readability is in the eyes of the beholder, not the language. I made this point in my APL book (https://xpqz.github.io/learnapl) -- just because I can't read Japanese does not make Japanese unreadable. Since I wrote that book, I've spent a few years immersing myself in APL, gradually rewriting thousands of lines of Python into APL, and it's such a productivity boost. My code is an order of magnitude smaller. More, sometimes. Fast, too.

For the right use cases, it's unbeatable. Sure, you probably wouldn't want to write an OS kernel in it, but anything that reads a bunch of data, mashes it up, and spits out some result, APL is a hand-in-glove fit. And with modern SIMD processors, APL really screams.

https://xpqz.github.io/cultivations

Drop in on https://apl.chat if you're interested.

ohbtvz

"Fast" is not relevant - the runtime would be just as fast if the code was written in plain words. Code size is also irrelevant unless you're called Elon Musk. The only claim left is that it's a productivity boost, but I just can't see how a language that needs a special keyboard to be written can be written more productively than actual words, especially with modern IDEs.

skruger

Speaking for myself, I find that whenever I think "I just can't see how..." it makes me want to figure out what it is that others can see that I can't. This is the reason I learnt APL, actually, after seeing half a page of k code and feeling annoyed that I couldn't read it. k subsequently led me to APL.

You can try it for yourself -- NumPy is a fair "Iverson ghost" -- APL without the symbols: it has a similar enough array model, and most of the APL primitives as functions or methods. APL lets you express linear algebra in a very natural way. Doing it in NumPy is much more convoluted.

Or try Rob Pike's (of Go fame) "ivy" -- his attempt at an APL-with-words (https://github.com/robpike/ivy).