Re: Programming language vote - results

["Jan Karman" <karman@knoware.nl>]

Bernecky's hypothesis

"APL still requires an oddball character set
"[..]
"I suspect that if we [the APL design community] had not been so blind to
the realities 
"of ergonomics, psychology, and display engineering, that we would have
abandoned 
"the APL character set long ago, and perhaps thereby made APL a far more
popular 
"language.

is easily be refuted.

Proof #1
It would have been as easy for APL vendors to deliver a free, suitable
keyboard together with the interpreter as it is for canneries to stick a
little key to the bottom of their cans in order to get access to the food
inside. 
I beleive IBM did in the old days, or was it only caps?, and DEC and Data
General had carefully designed decals, but you had to pay for it, presumed
you knew the secret numbers to order them by.
IBM abandoned this habit and even the decals disapeared from the boxes.
Why? 
Perhaps, it didn't add any value to the interpreter. This was a
"marketing-mix" solution. 
A trainee-salesman would have been able to sell the power and fun of APL
against the disadvantages of the oddball characters ("See that little key
sticked at the bottom? ... there's a deli inside!!").
Because knowledge of APL characters is only relevant to programmers, this
would have solved the oddball character problem.
If this had been really the problem it should have easily been solved 

Proof #2, by counter example, i.e. J
Could you say  e.g.: "Let's give APL common ASCII-characters and it would
become as popular as Yahoo?"  
At the same speed you could say : "If we should colour Campari corn-yellow
it would become as popular as beer." 

There's no need for 20,000,000 APL interpreters, but to solve some of the
mudding with computer languages in the 21st century (NB! not just the first
day) we'll badly need some powerful, symbolic language, as there are APL, J
or K. 
J is too complicated and too confusing (private opinion) 
K is privately owned (there seems no desire to make it popular).  
APL is available, cheep  ... and fun. "Stick more magic key to the can",
I'd say.

(Main gates :  http://www.acm.org/sigapl or http://www.vector.org.uk )