Great afternoon read! This is beautifully written and the language it self is really beautiful (especially in comparison to J). Apart from the difficulty to insert symbols, is there a technical or practical reason that it is no longer as popular as other old languages (like fortran, let’s say)? Or maybe what is the status of APL today? Would anyone use it in a project? Is there anything missing in APL that is found in matlab or numpy?
If you use Ride (Dyalog multiplatform APL ide) it's actually very easy to input the special characters: press the character on the toolbar or use the shortcuts (backtick ` followed by another char, shortcuts displayed hovering with the mouse on the toolbar).