Looking back on looking ahead

ABSTRACT

At the APL90 Conference I presented a paper (Programming Ecology, or APL and the World at Large) in which I suggested that APL's future was dependent on its becoming an integral part of a wider computing environment, and in it I made a number of proposals for accomplishing this. Comparing my analysis and proposals to how both APL and its environment have actually evolved in the intervening dozen years is both interesting and instructive, inspiring a mixture of celebration, trepidation, and sober reflection.