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Ramer returned to York University enchanted: “I guess that
was just something that really tickled my fancy and I fell in love
with the language.” 2 He was not the first or the last software en-
gineer to feel so strongly about the APL language. For him and
many others, the fascination of APL was not only its syntactic
simplicity, conciseness, and expressivity, but also Iverson him-
self and his programming language philosophy. “I can remem-
ber being absolutely blown away,” continued Ramer. “Coming
from a mathematical and computer (Fortran/Cobol/360 As-
sembler) background, I found APL elegant and logical. Finally,
you could make the computer do the things you wanted without
having to jump through hoops to talk the computer's language.”
Ramer's interest in computers had started in the early 1960s
when he entered the Applied Science in Electrical Engineering
program at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. At
that time the only computer on campus was an IBM 610.
This [computer] looked like a desk with an attached type-
writer - a one-user-at-a-time system. I soon switched my
hours in the computer lab to midnight, to 2 or 3 a . m .,
so I wouldn't have to line up. I remember the instructor
for the course, Wes Graham, saying to me near the end
of the term that I must not have much interest in this
area because he never saw me in the computer lab. My
response was to ask him to drop in at midnight, but he
never showed up at that time, nor did he again question
my commitment.
Ramer graduated from Waterloo in 1964. Four years later, he
was attending Iverson's talk at Queen's - one of the most influ-
ential lectures in his professional career.
To explain the impact of APL on Ramer, it is necessary to
switch the narrative focus temporarily onto Kenneth E. Iverson
 
 
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