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R is definitely an array programming language, but with the accent on statistics (historically, though you can do a lot more with it than that).

Fortran and Python are much more general purpose languages that also happen to have array operations to speed things up.

Matlab/Octave are more math oriented than any of the above and are far more than just programming languages, they are more like interactive notebooks, the IDE for Matlab (and for Octave too now, though I haven't worked much with it) is so closely coupled with the language that the language has no stand-alone right to existence.

APL, J and K are all more closely related to each other than to any of the others, the closest of the others would be R.



Minor aside: when I worked at Scilab I couldn't bear having to interact with a GUI so I got used to working either in complete CLI mode or sometimes in the partial CLI mode if I wanted to use a specific GUI feature. I only needed it for interactive plots or interfaces (iirc), however if I had been using xcos I would have needed it. So I don't know about Matlab / octave but I don't think they're fundamentally linked to their GUI; at least not in the sense of the programming language.


Octave only got a GUI 3 years ago, and spent 27 years not having one.




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