In her article entitled "The Future of APL in Education" 8, Traberman called for offering "a demonstration lesson to show teachers and/or students how easy and powerful APL is". Easy and powerful it may be, indeed; however, before he or she can appreciate APL, there are major problems that confront an APL novice. They include error messages (which usually do not provide them with much useful information at an early stage), readability (i.e. APL symbolic notations) and difficulties in coping with function looping (i.e. inefficiency in re-interpreting). These difficulties often result in criticism from APL laymen such as in 2, 5, 7, and may turn away some potential APL programmers or users.I offer the following example from my teaching experience, as an illustration of how to "guide" APL novices toward better understanding of appropriate APL programming.
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