15 Jan
2021
15 Jan
'21
4:33 p.m.
I have found that the ideal combination of languages to learn early are APL, Simula, LISP
and Smalltalk.
I was lucky enough to have started programming when that was possible.
From: "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2021 4:13:26 PM
Subject: Re: APL\360
On 1/15/21 3:07 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
But being an APL programmer does not preclude using
all the other
languages. One need to pick the language suitable for the job.
Back in the days when APL, COBOL, Fortran, ALGOL, etc. were the
norm languages were created domain specific. Today they are all
just General Purpose.
That's certainly true, but using a traditional language, such as JOVIAL
or PL/I is a lot more straightforward to an APL programmer (just view
everything as scalar and forget about the vector operators) than the
reverse.
My point is that taking APL as a starting point leads one to think about
problems differently.
--Chuck