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Many decades ago I was coaxed into signing-up for an APL class by my Physics professor. He was a maverick who had managed to negotiate with the school to create an APL class and another HP-41/RPN class with full credit that you could take instead of FORTRAN and COBOL (yeah, it was a while ago).

One of the things he pounded into everyone's heads back then was "The most important decision you have to make is how to represent the problem. Do that well and programming will be easy. Get it wrong and there isn't a force on this world that will help you write a good solution in any programming language."

In APL data representation is of crucial importance, and you see the effects right away. It turned out to be he was right on that point regardless of the language one chose to use. The advise is universal.




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