Rich kids are into COBOL

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 27, 2015, at 7:48 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> ...
> APL certainly encouraged thinking about things in a different way.  I wonder what today would look like if APL was used as a "first language" to teach programming.

It sure does make a difference.  I learned APL (a little) only recently, using it to do cryptanalys for a course.  That’s how I found OpenAPL, a pretty decent open source implementation.

Languages like Python do the same sort of thing, though not quite to the same extent.

For an even more extreme case, and to get your mind bent a whole lot, find an online copy of the Ph.D. thesis “Associons and the Closure Statement” by Martin Rem.  It’s from 1976, describing a way to write extremely parallel programs.  As far as I can tell, it still is beyond the state of the art to implement, but it sure is an interesting way to look at algorithms.

	paul