>Ah yes... A computer language that mathematicians would love due to its very concise nature (probably represents the other extreme to COBOL's infamous verbosity) as well as offering a lot of mathemetical functionality... Writing code in APL is probably easy part -- trying to decipher code you see before you (even code that was written by yourself -- only a few minutes ago) is the hard part...
>
>Speaking of languages that most folks find undecipherable... FORTH -- proably the primary reason why I can "get" the language is that I have a Hewlett-Packard calculator that uses RPN.

I never had that, but fell in love with Forth after just reading an article in a computer magazine, which was emphasizing the use of Forth to drive the cameras over the model of Death star in Return of the Jedi. So I found a Forth which would work on Spectrum, and started banging at it.

Several effects:
- I ended up not a bit more insane than I was
- the reverse order of things helped a lot a decade later when I was learning Hungarian
- it taught me how to break the job into smaller pieces - you have to know the pieces before you can lay them out in reverse order. Doing multiple conditional loops was mind boggling.
- when push came to shove, I was able to do PostScript from Fox - generated the graphic stuff on the fly, sent to GhostScript to render into a .png, served the webserver with a chart, all really fast. The .ps was bare bones, of course, but that's the beauty of doing it under your programmatic control, no overhead included, only the defs and verbs you really need. Simpler than writing "hello, world" in a text processor and printing into a .ps file... well not simpler to do, but the file you get was by more than an order of magnitude simpler.

I'd recommend spending a few hours with Forth, or rather a few days from time to time, just to remind myself that I'm a real programmer.

And I've seen stacks from both sides now.