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A former hedge fund manager and all-around thoughtful guy, Brooke Allen, says he thinks in APL. He's also the dude who does Staffup Weekend and is trying to change how people hire. A few years ago, in a different job market and another time, he had dozens of people learn APL as part of a job application process. 0_O

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Getting paid to program in APL sounds pretty fun to me- It's a shame most of the jobs seem to be finance-based.

I suggest checking out GNU APL. There are relatively few libraries, so there is lots of room for contribution.

Iverson's later language, J, is also open source. It doesn't require a special keyboard, has top notch documentation and online support resources and is open source under GPL3. It might or might not be a better place to get started than APL depending on a person's goals.

http://www.jsoftware.com/stable.htm

It's not really open source. Only the "core." The development environment is excluded.

(Looked into it recently and I was disappointed.)

Between the command line, scripts and Emacs the J IDE isn't really a big deal for me. Because J was a closed source commercial product and dates to the 1980's their may be copyright licensing issues tied into the code base. It's hard to release existing projects into open source.

I know a person who went through this program, and is still APLing today.

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