2 May
2024
2 May
'24
8:25 p.m.
On 2024-05-02 4:55 a.m., Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, 2 May 2024 at 00:51, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I have very poor memory, IF,REM,LET ect I can remember.
Line noise like TELCO err APL I can not make sense at all.
USA(IBM) pushed APL , Europe wanted ALGOL. What users got was
STUPID ASCII and the useless accent marks. Without real IO
lots of languages died, and we got C and Pascal but only for
the US. That just left BASIC the standard as it just needed
A-Z0-9[]+-=><;"
BASIC would be still around in ALT UNIVERSE running off the
cloud.
What would our world be like if the first home computers were to have had
APL, instead of BASIC?
To be perfectly honest I think the home computer boom wouldn't have
happened, and it would have crashed and burned in the 1970s, with the
result that microcomputers remained firmly under corporate control.
I have been watching the APL world with interest since I discovered it
at university, and I still don't understand a word of it.
I've been watching Lisp for just 15 years or so and I find it unreadable too.
I think there are widely different levels of mental flexibility among
smart humans and one person's "this just requires a small effort but
you get so much in return!" is someone else's eternally impossible,
unclimbable mountain.
After some 40 years in computers now, I still like BASIC best, with
Fortran and Pascal very distant runners-up and everything else from C
to Python is basically somewhere between Minoan Linear A and Linear B
to me.
I think I lack the mental flexibility, and I think I'm better than
most of hoi polloi.
If the early machines had used something cryptic like APL or Forth I
reckon we'd never have had a generation of child programmers.