I have listened and to me it always seems to come down to “you make reasonable points but it’s not a problem for me so it’s not a problem”.

And I think there’s a lot of implicit bias when people who like APL say it’s perfectly readable. Given how readability hits you in the face first thing when you see APL and how it’s not a widely used language, only the people enthusiastic about it and willing to overlook the readability issues will end up learning it. Of course they don’t find issues in practice, if they had issues with that they’d have probably abandoned the language quickly.

> and trust that for some people who do learn array languages, they do find it useful + productive, and a lot of the things you've raised are not issues in practice.

I’m not saying it isn’t useful or productive. That’s not the discussion. The point is that they’re languages that they’re hard to use and hard to read. I don’t see how it’s such a controversial point.

For example, I like LaTeX a lot. I’ve done quite a lot of things with it, it’s been very useful and I’ve been very productive with it. I have no problem reading that code. But the fact that I have no problems doesn’t mean there aren’t actual problems with LaTeX. LaTeX will always be hard to read and quite a bit messy no matter how used I get to it.

Yes - the first thing you notice when you see APL is 'this looks weird'. Most people then assume 'this is complicated, hard to read, and hard to use', and move on with their lives. Some people decide to learn it anyway, and quickly (within under a day) realise it is actually simple, readable, and easy to use!

It's not like some people are magically born with the ability to read APL (or anything else), and learning it isn't a matter of 'overlooking the readability issues', but rather realising the 'readability issues' are a false assumption. There's not 'bias', there's just experience.

That is why "they’re hard to use and hard to read" is 'controversial', because it is just not true.

> Some people decide to learn it anyway, and quickly (within under a day) realise it is actually simple, readable, and easy to use!

Do you think all people who decide to learn it anyway end up with the same conclusions?

> That is why "they’re hard to use and hard to read" is 'controversial', because it is just not true.

So things like symbols having different meanings depending on number of arguments, prefix notation making the arguments of functions/operators stand out less, making it reading right-to-left (which is different from what you usually read - that brings the fun question of whether APL is left-to-right in Arabic countries), or having to know extra symbols that aren't used in other contexts... All of those things are not real?

I come back to the LaTeX example because to me that's very similar. I get when you say "I don't find APL hard to read/understand/work with" because I feel the same with LaTeX (even though it's not as obscure and "alien-looking" as APL is). I write slides in LaTeX faster and better than what I could do with Powerpoint. But that doesn't deny that there are a lot of things in LaTeX that make things harder, even when those are part of the core and when removing them would mean removing good things about the language too.

I think all people who try to learn APL for more than about 5 minutes end up realising most of their assumptions were completely wrong. Maybe they don't reach exactly the same conclusions (a lot of people do), but they reach similar ones.

> So things like <APL things> are not real?

They are real, but they are not issues for anyone who has tried APL at all.

Advent of code is starting soon, I'd recommend that you pick an array language and give the first couple of problems a go in it - even if you don't like it, at least it would save you from making yet more uninformed comments next time an array language article is on HN (and save array language programmers worldwide the pain of reading them).