APL is more French than English

CRANK

Almost Perfect Artifacts Improve only in Small Ways:APL is more French than EnglishProfessor Alan J. PerlisYale UniversityI’m an apostate from ALGOL. Having been raised on programming languages of the ALGOL variety, I came under the influence of APL rather late in life. Like all people who enter interesting things late in life, one tends to go over one’s head very quickly. I think it might be interesting to say how I came under the influence of APL, because maybe many of you have gone the same route.I was at a meeting in Newcastle, England, where I’d been invited to give a talk, as had Don Knuth of Stanford, Ken Iverson from IBM, and a few others as well. I was sitting in the audience sandwiched between two very esteemed people in computer science and computing — Fritz Bauer, who runs computing in Bavaria from his headquarters in Munich, and Edsger Dijkstra, who runs computing all over the world from his headquarters in Holland.Ken was showing some slides — and one of his slides …