Man, I feel like APL has unlocked some latent part of my brain.

I'm a few years into seriously using APL and now work in it professionally doing greenfield development work.

Starting out, solving puzzles and stuff was fun, but trying to write real programs, I hit a huge wall. It took concerted effort, but learning to think with data-first design patterns and laser focusing on human needs broke through that barrier for me.

Writing APL that feels good and is maintainable ends up violating all kinds of cached wisdom amongst developers, so it's really hard to communicate just how brutally simple things can be and how freeing that is.

Interesting, how did you choose APL?

i worked in APL2 fulltime years ago, big asset backed bond models, big as in some of the largest workspaces the IBM support people had ever seen. Never occurred to me to pick it up again, but i have been looking for the Polivka/Pakin book i learned out of (the edition prior to their APL2 edition).

I'm thinking I'd like to learn array languages (APL, J) and maybe use them professionally. Maybe their time has come.

Could you give some examples of where you're using it?