Question about New York Times story -- features APL!

[jwgh]

OK, so the New York Times has a story about people competing to get a job programming APL, and I had a couple of questions when reading it.

The first regards this paragraph:

Less clear is why 27 unemployed people would spend nearly a month competing for a $40,000-a-year entry-level job as a junior programmer in the Jersey City offices of Maple Securities U.S.A.

and my question here is simply: Has the reporter ever been unemployed? (I was going to suggest that the NYT introduce a section titled 'Those Wacky Unemployed People', but then I noticed that they already have a section titled 'Job Market'.)

The second question is more interesting and involves this paragraph:

He received 300 responses. He invited the 300 to download a 500-page computer manual on A.P.L. and an accompanying quiz. The 38 applicants who returned the quiz were given a chance to learn the language and take a chance at one or possibly more available positions.

Basically, I'm wondering what the other 262 people's reaction to the APL manual was.

Let the speculation begin! References to GLAGOL are welcomed!

Comments

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the GLAGOL link. The idea of a Real Job programming APL warms my heart, too. Hell, mjd (http://www.plover.com/) might actually take the job just to say he'd been paid to write APL.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

$40,000 is higher than any salary I've ever made. If I wanted the job badly enough, damn right I'd compete for a month for it.

[yong-mi.livejournal.com]

I actually remember learning APL in grad school. *sob* To think I would be gainfully employed if I actually remembered it ...
Seriously, the financial modeling community seems to be very open-minded towards programming languages, in the sense that they don't require everything to be in Java, say. Big big support of Python in that community.