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The whole APL, the Turing prize, the Google which in the news in regard to that prize... All of them conspired.

Approximate quote from a C textbook: "Besides, C is actually the language made for programmers. Pascal is for students, Basic for housewives, Lego for schoolchildren, Fortran for scientist, APL for martians... Only C is for programmers." First time I saw APL I was suspicious - can it do anything in addition to matrix manipulation?

I do understand your concerns.

P.S. BTW, Dijkstra ones was asking Iverson if APL is actually Turing-complete, or something like that. Iverson produced a typical APL answer for a problem - which wouldn't say much to anybody who doesn't know the meaning of symbols. Just like reading in foreign alphabet.



The title of this article provides a good argument for "C being for programmers." Seems like for every language FOO there's bound to be between 1 and a-lot of tutorials and introductions 'FOO for C Programmers'. Most languages appear to have an inferiority complex when it comes to C, so they need to prove how much better they are...


More likely, new languages realize that they are the new thing and that (a naive mental model of) C is the established lingua franca of programming.




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