Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
I first ran into APL in engineering modelling, then in financial services - plagued by a horde of quants. Its fine when its used for its intended domain, but some folks try to apply it inappropriately - like bread and butter record keeping applications, or in one case instrument control  |
It's another instance of having a hammer and seeing everything as a nail.
All languages have domains for which they were intended. The friend I mentioned was a VP for years at a big financial house who was supporting bond traders with his code. APL was just made for that sort of thing.
If you understand its idioms, APL can be very expressive in a very concise form, and he mentioned APL coders who would see code and spend a couple of hours figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.
My pick for health hazard might just be the TECO language available on DEC mini-computers, where
everything was code, and a game among TECO programmers was figuring out what your name would do if entered as code in TECO.
The widespread and very popular Emacs editor began as a set of TECO macros for the version of TECO available on the DEC mini used at MIT's AI lab where it was developed. Lots of folks used TECO macros to make life easier. Richard Stallman and Guy Steele (mostly Stallman), collected and merged them under a regular syntax and the result became Editing MACroS, or emacs. It became the standard editor used at the AI lab, and Stallman commented that he realized how well it met the needs when
he could no longer recall how to do what Emacs did in standard TECO.
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Dennis