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Last year The Array Cast republished an interview with Iverson from 1982.

https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode92-iverson

It's quite interesting, and arguably more approachable than the Turing lecture.

In 1979 APL wasn't as weird and fringe as it is today, because programming languages weren't global mass phenomena in the way that they are today, pretty much all of them were weird and fringe. C was rather fresh at the time, and if one squints a bit APL can kind of look like an abstraction that isn't very far from dense C and allows you to program a computer without having to implement pointer juggling over arrays yourself.






> In 1979

many high schools were teaching mathematics with APL! There are quite a few textbooks to learn math with APL [1] or J [2] syntax. Iverson originally wrote APL as a superior syntax for math, the programming implementation came a few years later.

[1] https://alexalejandre.com/about/#apl [2] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Books#Math_for_the_Layman


I wish I was thought math with APL.

A little off topic, but I am always amazed at the crazy niche podcasts that exist out in the world.

As an example, I listened to a, now defunct, podcast about Type Theory. Wild esoteric stuff.




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