>>>>>Make him/her maintain old COBOL programs for the rest of his/her life.
>>>>
>>>>No, modifying uncommented APL is an even worse fate...
>>>
>>Nowhere near as terse or cryptic - three lines of APL often was equivalent to hundreds or thousands of lines of FORTRAN. I spent many evenings as an undergrad playing "whut duzzit dew?"
>
>Regarding APL -- I will take your word for it, Ed. The Jurassic period in my career mostly involved COBOL, various assemblers, and a few other languages thrown in for good measure. APL was never part of my experience, but come to think of it, I have heard more than a few folks verbalize profoundly disparaging utterances about it. Your comment above is "the icing on the cake," so to speak.
>
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My first language was APL. It's a GREAT language. You can do more things more quickly and more easily than in any other language I know. The problem is that it is SO rich that programmers have this tendency to prove how clever they can be. Thus the spagetti and trauma when inheriting another's code.