Dyalog on the Road

Recent events

APL Moot – UK, 27-29 April

In the proud tradition of APL Mooting from Ray Cannon's legendary early moots via Paul Mansour's Kefalonian & Tuscan extravaganzas to Stephen Taylor's inspired Iverson College in Cambridge the 2012 BAPLA AGM & Moot was held at the Lee Valley Youth Hostel, Cheshunt, on Friday-Sunday, 27-29 April. The moot dealt with a number of topics. Andy Shiers and John Daintree attended for Dyalog. They report that the time (largely) was spent on a discussion about the development environment. John and Andy found it most valuable as they were able to get a feel for how APLers are currently using the development environment. They also came away with a good understanding of what Dyalog can do to improve it – including those little features and issues which actually make a big difference to the users' experience. Those who have DSS will have seen a number of updates to the interpreter which were a direct result of the day's discussions.

All who attended felt that the day was very valuable, and Dyalog is considering arranging similar focussed discussions with groups of users in future. Many thanks to BAPLA (especially Phil Last) for arranging the Moot, and to Kai Jaeger for suggesting, organising and facilitating the discussion.

One Day Workshop on Single Assignment C (SaC) and APL Programming – Copenhagen, 28 June

DIKU and HIPERFIT hosted a one day workshop on Single assignment C (SaC) and APL programming. Participants had a chance to try out both SaC and APL in practice through separate tutorial/exercise sessions. The overall theme of the workshop was to investigate the possibilities for using SaC as a target for realizing a subset of APL, so as to utilize SaC's possibilities for parallel computations on modern hardware.

Gitte Christensen and Morten Kromberg undertook the task of running this workshop using TryAPL. All the attendees are UNIX and Mac focused, and they decided that pasting code into TryAPL from EMACS felt like a good way to play with it. This workshop was particularly interesting for Morten as it took place in the very building in which he finally abandoned his academic career, in 1986.

FinnAPL Forest Seminar Musings – 19-20 April

In the last issue of DYALOGue we mentioned that MiServer 2.0 was going to be presented at FinnAPL. Below you will find Brian Becker's impressions from the event which took place on April 19 & 20.

"I was blessed to attend my first FinnAPL Forest Seminar near Porvoo, Finland in April. I conducted two sessions on MiServer – a demonstration and workshop. Gitte presented a session on news from Dyalog, and Morten shared information about new features in Dyalog APL and shared some insights on Dyalog's technical roadmap. Rather than go into detail about the sessions at the seminar, I want to share some musings.

"From the first FinnAPL idioms list published decades ago to having met FinnAPL members at APL events over the years, I've long been a FinnAPL fan. It was great to see the FinnAPLers on their "home turf" and see the types of things they're doing with APL. I was particularly happy to see the work Jouko Kangasniemi has been doing with MiServer. Hearing him share his challenges and successes will help the APL Tools Group continue to improve MiServer. Another thing that struck me was that even though some of the presentations were not in English, I was able to follow along (more or less) by looking at the code that was being presented. This helped reaffirm to me that APL's (and J's) use of symbols help transcend the barrier of language.

"My first experience at the Forest Seminar was truly memorable and I hope that I can attend many more in coming years."

Dyalog APL Seminar – Virginia, USA, 20 July

Gitte Christensen and Morten Kromberg visited Virginia to share their expertise, and give and update on the current status of Dyalog APL at a seminar organised by Pat Buteux, our new VP of Sales & Marketing, US.

Seminar topics included:

• a short history of Dyalog APL
• references from clients
• APL in the agile framework
• APL in Web Services and future development plans

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Walt and Ingrid Constantine for hosting the seminar in the conference room of their company, CoSolutions Inc.

J Conference – Toronto, Canada, 23-24 July

Morten Kromberg, Gitte Christensen, John Scholes, Brian Becker, Dan Baronet and Roger Hui have just attended the J Conference. Roger gave a presentation on J GPL Source Overview and Morten on the topic Exciting Times for APL. Gitte gave a presentation on The Business of APL and John Scholes gave a presentation on Dyalog APL Adoption of J Ideas.

Upcoming events

2-8 September – Iverson College in Cambridge, UK

This week in September has been put together under the headline "Too productive for your own good?"

According to the organisers the Iversonian array languages (APL, J, kdb, q) are so productive that we almost all work either alone or in very small teams. We rarely benefit from the professional cross-fertilisation that is routine in big-team languages. Our work is mobile, so we are packing it on our laptops and bringing it to Cambridge University this summer. This is not a conference as such but a week of living and working among array-language colleagues. From Dyalog, Morten Kromberg, Gitte Christensen, John Scholes and Roger Hui will attend. You can review the programme for the week here.

14-18 October – Dyalog '12

In case you have managed to skip all information about the annual Dyalog User Conference in this issue of DYALOGue, here are the dates and the venue one more time: Sunday, October 14th - Thursday, October 18th (both days inclusive) at Konventum (previously LO-Skolen) in Elsinore, Denmark See the preliminary programme and register here. We strongly encourage you to take advantage of the Early Bird discount and register NOW. Early Bird expires August 28th 23:59 UTC.