The APL character set has contributed, more than any other facet of the language, to its lack of acceptance in the computing community at large. The character set is a metaproblem---not a problem in and of itself, but a creator of other recurring problems of hardware, software, ergonomics, and psychology. The adoption of new, ASCII-based dialects of APL, such as J, is suggested as one solution to the character-set problem.
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/considered-harmful-still-y2S4y3e6Ol