Every so often, some long-dormant concept pops into the front of my mind, and I go looking for further detail about it. Recently, one of these flashes inspired me to learn a bit more about an old, old language. The trail of my research took me to some fascinating stories about a very interesting man whose work was revolutionary in the programming world decades ago. The man was Ken Iverson and the language was APL.

I first encountered APL in the early eighties, through references in Byte magazine. Byte was a treasure trove of information about the state of the art in computing, and featured the latest in hardware, software and programming techniques.