A Letter from Dijkstra on APL

I wonder if EWD would have had the same opinion if he were alive today, with every Unicode font having the APL characters immediately available on the screen.

Did he feel the language design was bad, or would having TTF fonts being able to show "rho", "iota", "grade up" have removed one or more of his objections?

One can appreaciate striving for simplicity (a programming language that can be taught and explained with pen and paper), but one must also consider that computers are meta-devices.

Before computers, we could write things only on paper, either with our hands or a typewriter. So, naturally, when computers came about, the way of thinking about programming was very text-driven, with an emphasis on what a typewriter could represent.

But then, code could be written directly with computers, opening up more typesetting possibilities thanks to keyboards not being bound anymore by the mechanical limitations of typewriters. You could add keys and combinations to your heart's desire, and they would be natively digital and unlimited.

Now, with graphics, both 2D and 3D, and a myriad or other HIDs, shouldn't we try to make another cognitive jump?

Ironically, I think the examples given in the post validate Dijkstra’s points, instead of disproving them, as the author intended.

The opening paragraphs about how people enamoured by a shiny gadget will overlook a terrible interface brings immediately to my mind the modern day LLMs.