What ever happened to APL?
- by lkessler
When I was at University 30 years ago, I used a programming language called APL. I believe the acronym stood for "A Programming Language",
This language was interpretive and was especially useful for array and matrix operations with powerful operators and library functions to help with that.
Did you use APL? Is this language still in use anywhere? Is it still available, either commercially or open source?
I remember the combinatorics assignment we had. It was complex. It took a week of work for people to program it in PL/1 and those programs ranged from 500 to 1000 lines long. I wrote it in APL in under an hour. I left it at 10 lines for readability, although I should have been a purist and worked another hour to get it into 1 line.
The PL/1 programs took 1 or 2 minutes to run on the IBM mainframe and solve the problem. The computer charge was $20. My APL program took 2 hours to run and the charge was $1,500 which was paid for by our Computer Science Department's budget.
That's when I realized that a week of my time is worth way more than saving some $'s in someone else's budget.
I got an A+ in the course.
p.s. Don't miss this presentation entitled: "APL one of the greatest programming languages ever"
