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Comment by qop | Hacker News Reader

I want to draw APL. Like with a stylus.

That's pretty much how I'd want to use it, and the only way I'd bother. It's cool tech but it's general purpose appeal is nonexistent and there is already Julia and Matlab in technical computing space.

If I could draw APL symbols and have some common libraries for JSON and Http and stuff like that, I could see a renaissance having enough steam to do something.

Otherwise, it's only the top gun high level nerds that already use it anyways, that would want to work in non-ascii. Modern developers seem to have an ever decreasing attention span these days.

How many developers under 25 use vim? It's always less than it was last year.

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Remember the Palm Pilot? Drawing the ASCII-ish symbols in the little box? While I did memorize the strokes, I never found the process efficient. I don't think that drawing APL runes would be any better -- certainly not better than the key-combos of Dyalog's bespoke APL editor (free for personal use, BTW).

Wow, actually I do remember that, and it sucked!

So, I've never written apl, and I'm glad I read this comment because that's an excellent point you raise.

To expand a bit, I was thinking about being able to notate computation graphically. That's really what I want. Visual programming has existed and has sucked forever, but those thoughts don't go away that there might be a way to do it, if I just had the missing piece.

I need to sit down with dyalog and find out what I'm missing, it sounds like.

Thanks!

To be fair, ownning an iPad Pro, I can say first hand that the handwriting recognition possible with the stylus is actually quite remarkable and a great improvement from the old palm-pilot days.

With that new interface, could you see yourself jotting down a "sentence" of APL that maybe you think of in a meeting or something?

I mainly am interested in apl as a notation, there's a certain lispy zen to a language that unifies notation and code into the same thing.

Maybe there are better handwriting notations to explore for what I'm thinking.

> With that new interface, could you see yourself jotting down a "sentence" of APL that maybe you think of in a meeting or something?

If you've got an Android device you could give MyScript Calculator a go, if writing APL was as easy as writing equations on that app then it would be a lovely experience.

https://www.sacrideo.us/paper-is-dead-long-live-paper-progra...

I think one thing to consider would be actually using paper. The terseness means you don't really pay a 'retyping' penalty.

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