April 26, 2026
Croissants, code, and chaos
APL is more French than English
French vibes, fierce fights: APL as poetry, old legends say ‘non’ and memes fly
TLDR: Alan Perlis’s 1978 talk swoons over APL as code poetry while legends reportedly scoff. Comments split between “Fortran is the world’s common tongue,” pushback on mixing APL with while-loops, jokes that APL in France means housing aid, and a “fractals of badness” jab at PHP—art vs practicality.
Are we coding in French now? Not literally—but a resurfaced 1978 talk by computer pioneer Alan Perlis praises APL (a mathy, symbol-heavy language) as code that feels like poetry. He recalls sitting next to two giants who sneered—one vowed “never in Munich,” another “nor in Holland”—and the comments went full popcorn. The practical crowd, led by Hemospectrum, waved a quote like a flag: FORTRAN is the world’s lingua franca, the language everyone speaks. Translation: art is nice, but the world runs on common tongue.
Then came the “Franglais” fight. Perlis joked about blending APL with old-school structures (think while-loops), but commenter lokedhs pushed back, saying that mashup isn’t the fix. Cue a mini-culture war: keep APL’s strange beauty, or bolt on training wheels? w4yai cooled tempers with a reminder—this is a transcription from 1978—while the thread heated back up with jokes. mrjay42, posting from France, cracked that APL there means housing aid, so “APL is more French” suddenly sounded like rent money.
The hottest take came from adampunk: a love letter to R (stats language) and APL’s messy human elegance, capped with a zing at PHP’s “fractal of badness.” Meanwhile, historians linked Iverson’s roots here, as the room split between poets and plumbers. Drama served with croissants, anyone?
Key Points
- •Alan J. Perlis recounts discovering APL’s expressive power at a Newcastle meeting after seeing a concise APL one-liner by Kenneth Iverson.
- •Prominent figures Fritz Bauer and Edsger Dijkstra expressed skepticism about APL’s suitability for teaching, highlighting divided opinions.
- •Perlis contrasts APL’s brevity and elegance with FORTRAN, ALGOL, and PL/I, which he characterizes as more utilitarian.
- •Iverson’s 1963 talk in Princeton presented APL as a notation not necessarily intended to run on computers.
- •APL’s practical implementation emerged through Iverson’s move to IBM, collaboration with Adin Falkoff and others, the IBM System/360, and timesharing.