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Comment by julienchastang | Hacker News Reader

I watched this video a while back (and I don't think this is the first time it has been on HN). What is astonishing is Professor Bob Spence does not seem to make any typos during the half hour long video. It is good to see renewed interest in APL. I am still waiting for an APL interpreter on a tablet to take advantage of virtual keyboards to deal with the APL glyphs. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/APL...

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And it simply must support overstrike since that is no longer a display problem. The simplification of the keyboard that results is amazing. I've always been surprised that overstrike did not re-emerge with "bit mapped displays" and printers.

I started APL on a Selectric typewriter with the dancing type ball at IBM in 1967. The sounds of that demo still resonate more than I would have ever expected.

In 1975 I was using it to teach myself numeric signal processing. I think I learned it more deeply and quickly because of APL. One didn't so much code functionality as simply express what one wanted to see the consequences of. APL made exploration so easy you couldn't help it.

Had IBM had any idea what to do with APL, Matlab would simply not exist.

Good point about the mistakes. Interfaces in the old days didn't have any forgiveness, so one didn't make any mistakes. Like playing the piano.

Ngn-APL works relatively well on mobile (Javascript based.) I'd also love something more native, though

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