APL\360

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Fri Jan 15 10:44:50 CST 2021


On Fri, 15 Jan 2021 at 17:21, Nemo Nusquam via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> In 1999, a fellow student in a UML course worked for a large information
> company (Reuters, I think?) and told me that they had embarked on an
> expensive s/w conversion project.  Their back-end systems were
> implemented in APL and they could not find programmers -- even ones
> willing to learn APL for pay.

Later than that, Morgan Stanley was still using significant amounts of
APL, albeit in its own in-house dialect, A+

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%2B_(programming_language)

My lodger at one point (around 2005 I think) got a job with MS and had
to learn A+. He was a heavy Perl user before and maintained some
official Perl packages. He was given to improvising tiny cryptic Perl
one-liners on Linux to work stuff out, calculate dates, do file
management, etc. IOW he thought in Perl.

He commented to me in the pub a year or 2 later that he realised one
evening, doing some Perl work, that after some years working in A+, he
now found Perl irritatingly verbose, and that realisation rather
shocked him. :-)

Of course this is some 15Y ago now and it may no longer be in use, but
it certainly was well past the turn of the century.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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