> APL could have had much bigger impact and solve far more problems than spreadsheets ever will.
APL is a symbolic language that is very unlike any other language anyone learns during their normal education. I think that really limits adoption compared to spreadsheets.
That's true of the original APL design but later incarnations simplified it considerably.
Spreadsheets were unstable & cumbersome to debug if longer than a sheet, very slow iterative convergence and encouraged sloppy unwieldy coding, but of course, excelled at the presentation level. This resulted in endless number of "FORTRAN/C++ REPL" tools emerging to fill the gap.
To appreciate the revolutionary design of APL & its descendants, notice most of industrial tools that emerged in 90s & 2000's emulated it under the hood - MATLAB/sage, Mathematica, STATA/R/SAS, Tableau, and even CERN ROOT/Cling - in trading & quant finance Q/Kdb+ is still SOTA.
I learned array operations in MATLAB to a pretty sophisticated level, so I guess by the time I saw APL it felt cool but not revolutionary. The ideas exist in other languages and you don't have to learn much new or unintuitive notation.
APL is a symbolic language that is very unlike any other language anyone learns during their normal education. I think that really limits adoption compared to spreadsheets.