Modern APL derivatives (namely J and K) have ditched them though in favor of pure ascii.
Except for that minor technical advantage of actually being on a standard keyboard.
That said, I would love standard keyboards to get more symbols. I actally like using symbols instead of words for operators, when done in a consistent and logical fashion as J and K do and unlike Perl's disaster of a syntax.
Map and reduce (each and over in APL lingo, in K ' and /) should be a symbol.
The IBM/Unicomp APL keyboard is a standard PS/2 PC/USB HID keyboard. Literally the only special thing about the IBM/Unicomp APL keyboards is what is printed on the keycaps (which you can buy separately https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/USAPLSET).
I don't understand this - how do people on Hacker News not realize that your keyboard does not determine your character encoding? You can easily remap your keys to whatever you want, have multiple layouts for human and computer programming languages, change the modifier and functions keys, whatever you want. All with the keyboard you already have; laptop, external, it doesn't matter.
Somehow multiple layouts are not a big deal for multi-lingual people, why is it so confusing for programmers?
I don't know. I would totally do it if others did it. There just isn't a critical mass enough.
Maybe the next APLish language needs to have both modes of display similar to how java editors fold old constructs into new ones. That would allow the extra symbols to be slowly adopted.
I think "/" is a good symbol for map as it is easy access.