> whenever something APL related comes up on Hacker News, it's always in the form of arcana you'll laugh at rather than fascinating work being being done by very smart people. I find that offensive, but I'm not going to push back on that. I don't talk on Hacker News. But I've seen a lot of interesting things being posted about it, and the comments are always almost universally, like: "what the hell is that for?". And…
Sure, you can learn to read and write what superficially looks like line noise, but the market has spoken: very few people want to.
Look at the success of Tensorflow and PyTorch. They’re also tensor / array programming systems. They’re wildly popular, with at least two orders of magnitude more users each than all array languages put together.
The difference is that they’re built on top of Python, which is famously user-friendly in its syntax.
More importantly: they were parallel and GPU-accelerated from the beginning.
What’s the point of an array-based language if it’s slower and harder to write than the equivalent in mainstream languages!?
Their current niche of “quants analysing time-series data” is tiny and shrinking all the time.
There was even a chap here advocating the speed and terseness of his preferred array-based language.
Meanwhile the equivalent in Rust was something like a thousand times faster and not much longer!
Array-based languages have been infected by a particular style largely unique to certain types of mathematicians: brevity over clarity, obscure syntax over English, idioms instead of identifiers, etc…
They’ll never be popular while they remain purposefully niche, appealing only to the type of developer that uses single-character file names: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31363844