Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages (was: Way to flatten nested \include's?)

[Johan Vromans]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:41:54 +0200
Jacques Menu <address@hidden> wrote:

> In the APL course I took years ago, the teacher said: « Exercice for the
> next two weeks : find out what this sample program (25 symbols
> altogether) does. A guy says two weeks later: « It does this and that…
> but it took me two and a half hours to find out! » And teacher answers: «
> Well, it took me two hours to write! »

I recall that crucial to APL was its interactive environment. We had
dedicated ttys with APL keys. Program development was adding one symbol at
a time, trying what happened. Repeat until the program was finished.

For real programming we wrote Algol on punch tapes, later punch cards.
Turnaround time was one day, so you wrote the program, printed it, checked
manually, proved its correctness (I was educated by EWD) and then delivered
it at the computer department. APL wouldn't have stand a chance in that
environment.

I did like the language, in a peculiar way.

-- Johan