APL died for the same reason Perl is fading: it is a write-only language.
Those symbols look cool. But they're not very far away from Brainfuck.
Those symbols look cool. But they're not very far away from Brainfuck.
People who decry Perl as a "write-only language" have very rarely given Perl more than a cursory look. It has a lot of syntax, yes. It uses some shorthand symbols, yes, but not to the extent that APL does. The complaints about Perl from C or Python fans are just the same complaints Lisp folks have about C or Python syntax. Most of them are quick to proclaim how superior Python is. Oh, but Perl doesn't have invisible syntax nor a global interpreter lock.
In the rare occasions when I wrote Perl, the language offered all I needed to make my script as boring as Java, along with many temptations to be clever and concise; many people use Perl because it supports write-only "quackery", but it's their choice.
Alcohol can be consumed in moderation, but often isn't.
Parents can raise kids without being emotionally and physically abusive, but often don't.
Marriages can be healthy and stable lifelong commitments, but often aren't.
Education can help raise people out of poverty, but often doesn't.
Governments can provide stability and security for their constituents, but often don't.
It's not brevity for brevity's sake - it's understanding the limits of human working memory. The more verbose a description gets, the harder it is to work with it, until at some point, you just can't process it at all (at this point people start making indexes or developing notation to... make things more concise).
Comparing APL with Brainfuck is just ridiculous. The former is designed to be dense to enable efficient work; the latter is a joke that's designed to be sparse.
What ever do you mean? The comparison in the first comment (which I did not write) is apt. They both use a notation of symbols that are derived from Western notation. There was no further comparison with Brainfuck made.
In that comment, APL was further compared with Perl, which perhaps is what you meant to write? Perl's 'write-only' nature largely stems from its ingrained use of regular expressions. There are, indeed, some parallels between regular expressions and APL, both utilizing some kind of notation to concisely describe function.
On that note, regular expressions were the first programming language I ever learned and I feel I have a good handle on them. I still find no joy in reading them. It's simply not a good language to read, even if it can benefit on the write side. I'm not convinced that knowledge and experience makes something more enjoyable. There are a lot of things in life that I have plenty of knowledge and experience in that doesn't translate to enjoyment.
Sometimes we all just put up with the unreadable mess when it solves the problem at hand quickly.
Or today, custom keyboard mapping.