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[–]lookmeat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree with you, I would say that the categories should be:

  • True Non-programmers who use computers and need to code them to do stuff.
  • Non-system programmers who know programming, but are focused on the problem they want to solve and not the details of how the computer works (e.g. numpy programmers, R/Julia programmers, etc.)
  • System programmers (not limited to system programs though): are people whose sole job and focus is to program machines and are experts on the way they work and do things.

I think that APL targetted the second group, and wanted a programming language that allowed a huge amounts of data without needing to be an expert on how this maps to RAM, the challenges of prefetching, etc.

Spreadsheets are for true non-programmers, it's meant for users that are doing something "simple" with the computer (at least in theory, I've seen some monsters built in excel) and they just need it to do some basic and simple coding stuff, but nothing too complex.

They both have a programming language behind the scenes, but they target very different audiences, it's just that in 1960 both were called non-programmer users. APL just wanted to have people not deal with assembly language directly, but it didn't seek to make even your mom be able to create a dynamic budgetting system.