On 2024-05-02 4:55 a.m., Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, 2 May 2024 at 00:51, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
What would our world be like if the first home computers were to have had
APL, instead of BASIC?
To be perfectly honest I think the home computer boom wouldn't have
happened, and it would have crashed and burned in the 1970s, with the
result that microcomputers remained firmly under corporate control.
I have been watching the APL world with interest since I discovered it
at university, and I still don't understand a word of it.
I've been watching Lisp for just 15 years or so and I find it unreadable too.
I think there are widely different levels of mental flexibility among
smart humans and one person's "this just requires a small effort but
you get so much in return!" is someone else's eternally impossible,
unclimbable mountain.
After some 40 years in computers now, I still like BASIC best, with
Fortran and Pascal very distant runners-up and everything else from C
to Python is basically somewhere between Minoan Linear A and Linear B
to me.
I think I lack the mental flexibility, and I think I'm better than
most of hoi polloi.
If the early machines had used something cryptic like APL or Forth I
reckon we'd never have had a generation of child programmers.
I have very poor memory, IF,REM,LET ect I can remember.
Line noise like TELCO err APL I can not make sense at all.
USA(IBM) pushed APL , Europe wanted ALGOL. What users got was
STUPID ASCII and the useless accent marks. Without real IO
lots of languages died, and we got C and Pascal but only for
the US. That just left BASIC the standard as it just needed
A-Z0-9[]+-=><;"
BASIC would be still around in ALT UNIVERSE running off the
cloud.
