(Cross-posted from my personal blog)

I had encounters with programming in another BYU class, my senior Physics lab. This class was billed as “things about labs and such every Physics graduate should know”, but in practice seemed more like “how many ways can we torture Physics students one more time before giving them a degree?” It consisted of a series of modules that were only related in having something to do with Physics and something to do with labs.

Anyway, one of the modules involved writing a series of programs in APL, on a teletypewriter connected to a server computer via modem. So yes, you’d go into the lab, dial the server’s number on a telephone, and then place the handset on the modem attached to the teletypewriter and hope the connection worked.

APL stands for “A Programming Language”, which to be fair is correct as far as it goes. Now, I haven’t had anything to do with it for nearly half a century, so this is how I remember it. It was very mathematically oriented and very concise. It required a special keyboard because most of the operations were specified with mathematical symbols. Some of these symbols were for things like matrix addition and multiplication, so you could write a program that did a lot of calculating in only one or two lines of code. The downside of this concision was poor readability. More than once I wrote a program, got it working, and then the next day looked at it and couldn’t figure out what it was doing or how it did it. I’ve jokingly referred to APL as a “write-only” language. It did have, on the other hand, the idea of a “workspace” where your programs, data, and results were stored.