While perusing Jef Raskin's 1979 documents at Stanford, the author discovered a proposed "Apple Calculator Language" intended as a potential programming language for the Macintosh (which ultimately used Pascal). The manuscript includes Raskin's critiques of contemporary languages: he dismissed BASIC as weak but acknowledged its environment-driven longevity; criticized Pascal for rigidity and compiler-centric design; found Lisp overly recursive and unapproachable; yet praised APL extensively, though it later became an evolutionary dead-end.

The calculator language itself evaluates strictly left-to-right, uses "clumps" (numbers written side-by-side treated as a single entity), and includes operators like `TOTHE` (power), `INSERT` (apply operation across clump), and functions for trigonometry, rounding, and random selection. Negative numbers use an underscore to avoid confusion with subtraction. The author, with Claude Opus 5, built a working implementation that matches 162 of 166 primer examples; four discrepancies favor the left-to-right rule over the manuscript's worked answers.

Raskin's vision emphasized minimizing programmer effort over formal computer-science purity—a philosophy echoed in his observation that BASIC's popularity proved "minimizing programmer effort and time is often more important... than the language's features."