"I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In particular, I adopted the matrix algebra used in my thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays (almost) learned in a course in Tensor Analysis rashly taken in my third year at Queen’s, and (eventually) the notion of Operators in the sense introduced by Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell’s equations."
"I did not join IBM until 1960, at which time I was just finishing up my A Programming Language, published in 1962. It included a chapter (called Microprogramming) on the formal description of the IBM 7090 machine."
Well, considering I met Iverson, attended many if his lectures during conferences in the early ‘80’s, actually used APL professionally for about ten years —including using it for a system involved in the race to decode the human genome— and even published a paper and gave a lecture at an APL conference...
Still, I appreciate the misinformed down-votes. Always good fun.
The number of people on HN who talk about APL as though they actually understood what they are talking about seems to increase with time. It’s like watching people have opinionated discussions about SQL when they’ve only read about it, googled a few articles and tried it for half an hour.
"I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In particular, I adopted the matrix algebra used in my thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays (almost) learned in a course in Tensor Analysis rashly taken in my third year at Queen’s, and (eventually) the notion of Operators in the sense introduced by Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell’s equations."