50 Years of APL
2016 is a BIG year for APL, as we're going to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this tremendously strong, agile and productive Tool of Thought.
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SAVED 1966-11-27 15.53.59 (GMT-7)
The save date of the first hand-made clear workspace marks the beginning of APL as an interactive tool. Since then, the development of the language has continued apace, and today modern APL systems allow you to tap in to everything that modern technology has to offer.
APL continues to be an eminent Tool of Thought for domain experts, who can use it to explore data, discover algorithms and express their thoughts clearly and simply. Much has been achieved to facilitate seamless integration in a global technology world that demands Object Oriented Programming, Unicode, parallel processing, cloud hosting, web interfaces, multiple gadget access to applications from smartphones, tablets and laptops. Most new work is done on new platforms, but a number of mainframe applications remain operational, and APL applications are used globally for finance, oil & gas, healthcare, education, insurance, asset management, risk assessment, statistics, bioinformatics and many more areas of vital importance.
In co-operation with the BAA we have dedicated a part of the Dyalog 16 user meeting, Wednesday October 12 and the morning of Thursday October 13, to the celebration of APL's golden anniversary with presentations covering 50 years of APL.
To commemorate the anniversary, we're collecting materials related to half a century of APL. If you have a photograph, video, or any other material that we can publish or a good story from the first 50 years, please email apl50@dyalog.com; our APL 50th anniversary webpage has just been launched, so have a browse and see what we have managed to collect do far.
If you have a good story you'd like to share with all the users attending Dyalog '16, then please let us know. Your story does not need to be long, but in addition to full-length presentations we are planning to have a session for anecdotes, just 5-10 minutes per story, to remind us how far we have come and how much fun it's been en route!
Follow us and contribute on twitter using the hashtag #50yearsofapl.
Note: If you would like to bring physical items for the anniversary celebration at Dyalog '16, we will be creating a mini exhibition, but please note that we do not have room to store items, so you will have to take it back with you after the user meeting.