The use and disuse of APL

Abstract

A sample of over 200 workspaces containing over 80,000 lines of code were analyzed to determine their composition and structure. Statistics were gathered on the frequency of all monadic and dyadic functions, operators, system variables and functions as well as other workspace and defined function characteristics. The results of the study indicated that only a fraction of the APL primitive function set was being utilized despite the language's richness. The ubiquitous 80-20 phenomenon was well represented. In general, 80% of all APL usage occurred with 20% of the available function set. This seems to support a contention that more awareness needs to be directed toward “thinking primitive” instead of only “thinking array”. Some comparisons with a previous study by Saal and Weiss will be made.