This is a good article to understand the thinking behind array languages in general, and APL in particular.

However, I disagree with some points made. In particular, this one:

> Some people say the most important issue at hand is to improve the data structures of APL. Others say what APL needs is a little bit of Franglais, which in our terms is APLGOL. “If APL only had the while-statement, or the if-then-else, or the for-statement, it would become such a perfect language.” That’s ridiculous. And it’s silly to say that if APL had arrays of arrays, all of our troubles would disappears. In point of fact, what will happen is that the amount of troubles would just grow almost exponentially if that happened.

This turned out to be untrue. And the resistance in the community to do this is partly what lead to its loss of popularity.

Modern array languages, and indeed most APL implementations, have these things and they did not create troubles. In fact, it made them practical and easier to learn, because it allows users to use the style that suits the problem at hand the best. And in some cases, a pure array solution is just not appropriate.

▲

DarkNova6 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah. It strikes me as the same line of argument that Go used to stop generics.

▲

Joker_vD 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, frankly, the main argument that Go used is that getting generics right from the outset was both hella important and hella hard, so they'd rather postpone it until they have a rather good idea of how the language is actually used in the wild and what the pain points of lacking generics are, and only then add them, in a way that fits Go's spirit.

	▲	lokedhs 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Which would have been fine. In fact, if you read the notes from the very first implementation of APL you'll find that it was noted that they considered the lack of proper flow control as a gap that needed to be filled later. Yet, even as the 90's rolled around you could find people writing articles in Quote Quad arguing that suggestions to add structured programming constructs to APL was somehow going against the spirit of the language. Kinda sad it took 50 years for that attitude to change.