Usage
APL has long had a small and fervent user base. It was and still is popular in financial and insurance applications, in simulations, and in mathematical applications. APL has been used in a wide variety of contexts and for many and varied purposes. A newsletter titled "Quote-Quad" dedicated to APL has been published since the 1970s by the SIGAPL section of the Association for Computing Machinery (Quote-Quad is the name of the APL character used for text input and output).
Before the advent of full-screen systems and until as late as the mid-1980s, systems were written such that the user entered instructions in his own business specific vocabulary. APL timesharing vendors delivered applications in this form. On the I. P. Sharp timesharing system, a workspace called 39 MAGIC offered access to financial and airline data plus sophisticated (for the time) graphing and reporting. Another example is the GRAPHPAK workspace supplied with IBM's APL2.
Because of its matrix operations, APL was for some time quite popular for computer graphics programming, where graphic transformations could be encoded as matrix multiplications. One of the first commercial computer graphics houses, Digital Effects, based in New York City, produced an APL graphics product known as "Visions", which was used to create television commercials and, reportedly, animation for the 1982 film Tron.
Interest in APL has steadily declined since the mid-1980s. This was partially due to the lack of a smooth migration path from higher performing mainframe implementations to low-cost personal computer alternatives, as APL implementations for computers before the Intel 80386 released in the late 1980s were only suitable for small applications. The growth of end-user computing tools such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access also eroded into potential APL usage. These are appropriate platforms for what may have been mainframe APL applications in the 1970s and 1980s. Some APL users migrated to the J programming language, which offers more advanced features. Lastly, the decline was also due in part to the growth of MATLAB, GNU Octave, and Scilab. These scientific computing array-oriented platforms provide an interactive computing experience similar to APL, but more resemble conventional programming languages such as Fortran, and use standard ASCII.
Notwithstanding this decline, APL finds continued use in certain fields, such as accounting research.
Read more about this topic: APL (programming Language)
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