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Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

I've seen APL in use in industry for industrial simulation tools. I thought it was a pretty cool technical decision because of how good APL is at exactly the kind of vector math they were doing (I even offered to join their team just for a chance to learn APL.) Unfortunately, they were a little too excited about APL and went and built a bunch of APL GUIs on top of their simulations, which were giving them huge maintenance headaches.

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It's the perfect use case for calling out to a library. When I worked in a research lab, we had a ton of math functions written in Fortran by old white beards that were great - plus we could call them from C, or Python or whatever.

I could imagine writing some hard math core functionality in APL then wrapping it up

I'm not a big fan of complicated GUIs or practically any GUIs to be honest. Their complexity is vast and code wise, they often make up a majority or at least very significant part of an application. I get it if you're selling a product, but if it's just an internal tool, I find it's usually just not worth it in the long run.

This is literally why VBA+excel are so pervasive: it’s a way to slap together a UI with no/minimal code.

There is a vision of a future where non-CS engineers could function with an interface that’s basically a Jupiter notebook with “import simulator” at the top, but managers are loathe to make that level of scripting competence a requirement for an already fairly specialized role.

Excel combined with APIs and either minimal VBA or COM AddIns is also perfect method to do random data entry or query interfaces for your end users if you have MS Office on Windows as your common office platform.

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