Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages

“There is a reason I use ‘old’ languages like J or Lush. It’s not a retro affectation; I save that for my suits. These languages are designed better than modern ones. There is some survivor bias here; nobody slings PL/1 or Cobol willingly, but modern language and package designers don’t seem to learn much from the masters. Modern code monkeys don’t even recognize mastery; mastery is measured in dollars or number of users, which is a poor substitute for distinguishing between what is good and what is dumb. Lady Gaga made more money than Beethoven, but, like, so what?” This isn’t just a thing among programmers. The entire industry is obsessed with user numbers, number of applications, and other crap that is meaningless when you consider programming to be art. When I post a new item about some small hobby operating system, the comments will be filled with negativity because it’s no Windows or iOS, whereas only ten years ago, we’d have lively discussions about the implementation details. And then people wonder why that scene has died out.

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