Our country has lots of problems. One of them is BASIC. BASIC fits the minds of the people who run our secondary schools—simple, tidy, relatively cheap. And teachers find it is no more difficult to teach than anything else they teach. So it seems to fit into our secondary schools and kids are now coming to college already suffering from a disease that I don't think we'll ever be able to excise. When they come into my course, and I ask them to start programming in APL, I find they can't. They're crippled already. Their minds are already deranged. The first thing they do is set / equal to 1. The natural first step out of the womb is to set / equal to 1. Then you cast around for some place to use it. Let's use it in X, so you have X(I). And you manipulate it for a while and then you increment /, and then you test and you jump, and that's programming. That's life. When I tell these people that that's not the way to do things at all, but that they should look for a pattern and do things in parallel, to erect the whole structure at once, they can't. Then they come to me after a while and they say, "APL is unstructured. There's no while in it." I say, "It's got nothing but wiles", which pun they don't get.
Alan Perils
