Well, I'll be the dark cloud here. As someone who used APL professionally for a decade, having studied and interacted with many of the early APL pioneers, including Ken Iverson, everything related to J, including this article's proposal, is an absolute abomination to me.

What many people lack is a sense of history. Why does something like J even exist? Do you know? I do. It was a horrible mistake on the part of Iverson in response to the limitations of the hardware issues we had to deal with at the time (think 80's).

How does a man who authored a paper exalting the advantages and power of notation as a tool for thought [0], turn around and create something like J?

Simple answer: Business, for the most part, and, if I am going to be benevolent, a naive attempt to bring something to the masses (while destroying APL).

Here's what you had to do at the time if you wanted to run APL on IBM PC's (or clones):

- Buy a specific motherboard (if it was not an original IBM PC)
- Buy a specific graphics card (which really wasn't a graphics card at all, just text)
- Purchase or program a character EPROM that replaced rarely used characters with APL characters
- Swap out the stock character ROM with the custom EPROM
- In some cases install a toggle switch outside the computer to be able to switch between APL and standard ROM's
- Purchase either an IBM Selectric or pinwheel printer
- Purchase an expensive character ball for your IBM printer or an equally expensive APL character for your printer
- And then you had to buy your APL interpreter from a company like STSC for hundreds of 1980's dollars

This meant a number of things:

- APL was outside the purview of "civilians"
- Normal office environments were never going to consider something like this
- There was a cost and technical complexity to wanting to use APL
- Installing a modified APL character EPROM broke applications that relied on the characters
in the character table that were replaced (mostly characters you could use for basic drawing on a terminal)
- APL was very much limited to those who absolutely-positively had to have it
- That meant academia and very niche applications (financials)
- Widespread adoption was pretty much impossible

It is in that context that Iverson thought-up the idea of transliterating APL symbols into combinations of ASCII characters. It was a failed attempt to make things more accessible to the masses by compromising the very foundation of APL. This was very short-sighted. Computers evolved very quickly and very soon both displaying and printing APL characters was within the reach of any 15 year old with a computer.

And it was a failure. Not the least of the reasons for this being that, to the average person, J code looks like ASCII vomit. APL has distinct symbols, just like mathematics. One might not be able to understand the code but the end product not only looks very different from ASCII vomit, it is. Because notation has power.

The correct path would have been to understand technology would catch-up to the requirements of APL and focus on extending and improving the language. A simple example of this would be adding an object-oriented programming layer to the language. Compilation and distribution through executable files and (civilian) installation packages, which are valuable for commercial closed-source security and deployment, would also have been a valuable add-ons. I was working with Assembler, FORTH, C, and C++ at the same time I worked with APL. I could deliver executable user-installable programs in any of those languages --and sell them!-- while my use of APL was limited to a range between academic and internal tools. It would have been brilliant to have been able to deliver finished user applications indistinguishable (by the user) from those written in C or C++. That was impossible. They should have worked on that, and more.

Frankly, I have been wishing, for decades now, for someone to stand on the shoulders of APL and develop it's successor. A rich SYMBOLIC language capable of allowing rich and effortless expression of ideas at an entirely different level of thought and abstraction than for-loops and indenting lines by four spaces.

Anyhow, it's a soapbox. I know. Getting off it. I need to go do some useful work.

[0] http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pd...