APL\360

[Norman Jaffe]

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