On Fri, 15 Jan 2021, Nemo Nusquam via cctalk wrote:
As a grad student, I still remember the row of APL terminals at the computer centre with their APL-specific keyboards, always ruing that I had no time to learn it.

I guess that I was lucky?

At GSFC, I was in an entry level job ("Data Technician"), having EAM experience and some FORTRAN, being paid as a go-fer, but being expected to learn and do more and more stuff. Such as simple FORTRAN to draw graphs on Calcomp plotters.

I had some calculations to do, and THE calculator (on a typewriter cart) was in use elsewhere.

One of my senior cow-orkers (a programmer) spent about a minute showing me that you could do routine arithmetic in APL.
So, it only took a few minutes before it was saving me time and effort.

After I was using it for calculator work for a little while, he came back and showed me how to write simple programs, and got me access to some manuals.

I was never GREAT, but I found it easy to learn new stuff in it. I had been fascinated with matrix algebra in high school, and was thrilled to see some of the things that APL could do.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred                 ci...@xenosoft.com

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