[fvt]

+1.

Most text editors operate text substitutions (like "<-" turning to "←" automatically), so ASCII doesn't seem inevitable anymore (and I believe it's even truthier with virtual keyboards).

I worked in a company where APL used to be very strong (large french truck manufacturer) and they even had lots of programs written in Scheme for assembly-line optimisations in the late 90s. Most of those have been rewritten (should I say... painfully rewritten, and now buggy) in Java in 2005.

I feel like APL/CLisps/etc. were the right solutions but developers/managers were/are scared when they saw some of the mathematical/proof concepts they had to use, and were afraid of when they learned about them at the university.

[lucozade]

We had an APL implementation and it was replaced 5 or so years ago.

It wasn't because of scared management. It was because they were paying for language knowledge not business knowledge. What replaced it, mostly C++ and Python, had better tooling and a wider pool of subject expertise to draw from.