Taking Back Ctrl: Keyboard Shortcuts in the Dyalog IDEs

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In this blog post post I describe:

  • how to use standard Ctrl keyboard shortcuts when using Dyalog on all platforms.
  • little-known APL input features for Microsoft Windows.
  • alternative input methods that do not use the Ctrl key for APL input.

I don’t personally use the official Dyalog IME for Microsoft Windows as my daily APL input method. My only complaints are that it forces me to use the Ctrl key for APL input, which conflicts with conventional shortcuts for most applications, and for some reason it puts an additional item in my input method list because I have a Japanese input enabled, even though that is not a supported layout for the IME!

I am a fan of Adám’s AltGr keyboard for Windows for a couple of reasons. It is based on the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), and appears to work in newer Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and with the default On-Screen Keyboard on Windows. It also has accents and box-drawing characters. However, support might be unreliable, because Microsoft do not officially support MSKLC on Windows 11, and there are rumoured issues with using it on ARM machines. Its main drawback is the limited choice of shifting keys, which can make it difficult to use with certain keyboard layouts or in certain applications. Personally, I am fond of using Caps Lock as my primary APL shifting key, because it is rare these days that I need to TYPE A BUNCH OF THINGS IN ALL CAPITALS – it feels like shouting.

I used to do this by mapping Caps Lock to Alt Gr through some registry trickery. However, Kanata allows me to use almost any keys I like. I now have Caps Lock and Right Ctrl as APL shifting keys. In addition, I can double-tap Caps Lock to toggle it, so I can SHOUT OVER TEXT if I really need to. It’s cross-platform, so my single APL Kanata configuration gives me a consistent experience even when using my Linux virtual machine. There are still many features on my wish list for a comprehensive input method editor, but this is quite good for now (I wonder if anybody is able to adapt mozc for APL?).

Whichever keyboard input method you use, once you are not using Ctrl for APL input you will be very glad to get back your beloved, conventional keyboard shortcuts for use in the Dyalog editor.

In the Dyalog IDE for Microsoft Windows, you can set keyboard shortcuts by selecting Options > Configure in the Session’s menu bar, then selecting the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. From here, you can click on a code that corresponds to an action for which you want to set a shortcut.

Dyalog IME for Microsoft Windows Configuration Dialog

These are keyboard shortcuts recognised by the Dyalog development environment.

I set:

  • <FX> to Ctrl+S to save changes in the editor without closing it
  • <SA> to Ctrl+A to select all text in a window
  • <CP> to Ctrl+C to copy text
  • <CT> to Ctrl+X to cut text
  • <PT> to Ctrl+V to paste text
  • <SC> to Ctrl+F to search and find text in the session log, editor, and debugger
  • <RP> to Ctrl+H to search and replace text in the session log, editor, and debugger

To help find these in the list, click on the Code column title to put them in alphabetical order.

In Ride, only <FX> needs to be set, as the other shortcuts should default to this behaviour.

Having said all that, the official Dyalog IME still has features that would be invaluable especially if I were a brand new user. You can read about these in the Dyalog for Microsoft Windows UI guide and configure them using the IDE by going to Options > Configure > Unicode Input > Configure Layout. A little-known tip is that its backtick (also known as introducer or prefix) input method offers a searchable keyword menu, so that you can find glyphs by name or by the name of the function or operator it represents.

After setting the prefix introducer key to # (octothorpe / hash), pressing twice and typing “rot” shows suggestions for the glyphs ⌽ and ⊖ with the keywords “rotate” and “rotatefirst”.

There’s also the wonderful overstrike feature. Once upon a time, APL was executed on remote machines accessed using the IBM Selectric Teletype typewriter; you can see this in this demonstration from 1975. Certain characters would be composed by typing one symbol over another, such as printing a vertical bar (|) over a circle (○) to produce the circle-bar glyph for rotate/reverse (⌽).

Its basic usage is a feature of the IDE for Microsoft Windows; the IME isn’t required at all. If you press the Ins key on your keyboard, it usually toggles “insert” or “overtype” mode. This is typically indicated by the vertical bar text cursor changing into an underbar. Typing will then replace existing text indicated by the cursor. With overstrikes enabled, APL glyphs can be created using other glyphs!

APL Glyph Overstrike Animation

Insert, Slash (/), LeftArrow, Dash (-), Circle (○), LeftArrow, Stile (|)

The IME allows you to use this in applications other than Dyalog by ticking Enable Overstrikes from the IME settings. You can read the documentation to learn more, but the basic mechanism is to use the Overstrike Introducer Key (default Ctrl+Backspace) followed by entering the two symbols to overstrike.

Settings menu for the Dyalog Input Method Editor

For this post I just wanted to highlight aspects of APL input beyond the simple defaults. For more about using your keyboard with Dyalog, see Adám’s blog post about enhanced debugging keys.

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Advent of Code 2025 – Day 1 in APL

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Advent of Code is an annual challenge in which a new programming puzzle is released every day for the first 12 days of December. We always see some great solutions in Dyalog APL. I’m going to look at the first problem, drawing on my own solution and some of those that have been shared across various message boards and in the APL Wiki.

Parsing

Day 1’s problem tasked us with uncovering the password to enter the North Pole by counting how often a dial points to zero in a sequence of rotations. Before we can solve the problem, we have to parse the input file we’re given. If you’re not interested in the parsing, you can move straight to Part One, but you’ll miss a cool new way to use the ⎕-functions!

The standard way to read a text file is to use the ⎕NGET (Native file GET) system function. A little known addition to ⎕NGET, available in the recent Dyalog v20.0 release, is the ability to load a file directly into a matrix. This is faster than loading each line as a character vector and mixing them together, and is very handy for Advent of Code problems, which often have rectangular input files.

To parse the numbers given in the input file, it’s easy to use ⍎ to execute the text for each number as APL code, yielding the number as a result. For a fun exercise like Advent of Code, this is fine, but in production code, this can be very dangerous. If you’re ⍎-ing text provided by a user, they could provide a malicious input like ⎕OFF, or worse! This is why the system function ⎕VFI (Verify Fix Input) exists, to parse numbers and only numbers. ⎕VFI also allows you to configure the separators between numbers. For instance, you could use ','⎕VFI to parse numbers separated by commas.

Using ⎕NGET and ⎕VFI together gives a very neat way to parse the input, abusing the Ls and Rs as delimiters for the numbers.

      ⎕IO←0
      input←⊃⎕NGET 'example.txt' 2 ⍝ provide the flag 2, to load the file as a matrix
      input
L68
L30
R48
L5
R60
L55
L1
L99
R14
L82
      1↓,input ⍝ our input numbers are delimited by 'L's and 'R's
68L30R48L5 R60L55L1 L99R14L82
      size←1⊃'LR'⎕VFI 1↓,input ⍝ use ⎕VFI, telling it that 'L' and 'R' are the separators
      size
68 30 48 5 60 55 1 99 14 82

This is much faster than loading the input into separate lines, and executing the number on each one.

      ]Runtime -c "1⊃'LR'⎕VFI 1↓,⊃⎕NGET 'input.txt' 2" "(⍎1↓⊢)¨⊃⎕NGET 'input.txt' 1"

1⊃'LR'⎕VFI 1↓,⊃⎕NGET 'input.txt' 2 → 6.9E¯4 |    0% ⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕
(⍎1↓⊢)¨⊃⎕NGET 'input.txt' 1 → 5.9E¯3        | +754% ⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕

In addition to the sizes, we also need to parse the direction of each rotation. This is a simple matter of comparing the first column of the input against 'L' or 'R', choosing a 1 for each 'R' (as a right turn is considered positive), and a ¯1 for each 'L' (as a left turn is considered negative). The classic way to do this is with ¯1*.

      input[;0]
LLRLRLLLRL
      direction←¯1*'L'=input[;0]
      direction
¯1 ¯1 1 ¯1 1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 1 ¯1

As an alternative, Reddit user u/light_switchy found the very nice train 'R'(=-≠) for this.

      'R'(=-≠)input[;0]
¯1 ¯1 1 ¯1 1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 1 ¯1

Tacit programming can be tricky to read. For the benefit of those of us who prefer explicit code, 'R'(=-≠)x is evaluated as ('R'=x)-('R'≠x), which is the same as ('R'=x)-('L'=x), since x is made up of only 'R's and 'L's.

Part One

Many APLers have solved this year’s first problem, and the approach is so natural that everybody’s solution had a similar shape. By multiplying the size and direction of each rotation, we can find the difference in position that each rotation makes:

      size×direction
¯68 ¯30 48 ¯5 60 ¯55 ¯1 ¯99 14 ¯82

We can then use a sum scan to find the cumulative position of the dial after each rotation, remembering to include the starting position (50):

      +\50,size×direction
50 ¯18 ¯48 0 ¯5 55 0 ¯1 ¯100 ¯86 ¯168

We are working with a circular dial, so instead of going above 99, or below 0, we want to wrap around the numbers on the dial. We can use residue (|) to fix this:

      100|+\50,size×direction
50 82 52 0 95 55 0 99 0 14 32

Finally, we are required to find the number of times the dial is left pointing at zero. Counting this is straightforward, the hard work has already been done:

      +/0=100|+\50,size×direction
3

Part Two

For part two of today’s problem, we are asked to find not only the number of times the dial finished a rotation on zero, but also the number of times any click of the dial points it to zero.

For the size of input we are given today, generating the position of the dial after every single click is an acceptable solution. You could do this using ⍳ and some transformations, but several people found a nice trick to transform the code from part one into exactly what we need.

In part one, we represented the rotation L68 by the number ¯68, meaning 68 clicks in the negative direction. For this part, we want to represent each of those clicks independently, which we can do by replicating the direction by the size of the rotation, rather than multiplying it:

      size/direction
¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ¯1 ...

Using the same method as in part one, we can find the position of the dial after every single click, and count the number of times we see a zero:

      +/0=100|+\50,size/direction
6

This is a change of just one character from our part one solution, very elegant! Therefore, our solution for day one is:

      input←⊃⎕NGET 'input.txt' 2   ⍝ load the input as a matrix
      size←1⊃'LR'⎕VFI 1↓,input     ⍝ parse the size of each rotation
      direction←¯1*'L'=input[;0]   ⍝ find the direction of each rotation
      +/0=100|+\50,size×direction  ⍝ solve part 1
      +/0=100|+\50,size/direction  ⍝ solve part 2

If you’re interested in a more performant solution, there is a way to avoid generating all the intermediate positions of the dial. Handling the edge cases is tricky, but it runs much faster. This blog post is long enough already, so I’ll leave determining how it works to you!

      ]Runtime -c "+/0=100|+\50,size/direction" "SecretFastSolution"

+/0=100|+\50,size/direction → 1.2E¯3 |   0% ⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕
SecretFastSolution → 3.2E¯5          | -98% ⎕

Advent of Code 2025 is open for submissions until 12 December 2025, so it’s not too late to get involved! Trying the problems yourself, and then reading the approaches by others, is a fantastic way to learn new programming techniques. Happy APLing!

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Welcome Asher Harvey-Smith

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When he was young(er), Asher used to invent fictional languages for fantasy creatures. It should have been no surprise, then, that he found a love of designing and implementing programming languages when he began to experiment with computers. He studied computer science at the University of Warwick, where he discovered APL and was immediately hooked. After one cold email, two internships at Dyalog Ltd, and a master’s degree, Asher joined us officially as a developer.

Asher is working primarily on the interpreter, and is interested in both performance and correctness (two of our core values, so he fits in well!). Having implemented several small interpreters on his own, he is in awe at everything Dyalog APL can do, and eager to push it to even greater heights. He also loves to teach and present APL to new audiences, particularly when he can distill concepts into visuals and animations.

Outside work, Asher enjoys word games and board games. Once a keen chess player, he defended Dyalog Ltd’s honour against chess hustlers on the streets of New York whilst preparing for DYNA Fall 2025! He also goes running (when it is not too cold), and spends a lot of time on trains to visit his scattered circle of friends.

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Welcome Martin Franck

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One of the most formally-dressed members of Team Dyalog, Martin enjoys managing cloud infrastructure and helping everyone get even further with IT. He comes from a somewhat classical background, having worked his way up from changing printer toner to managing teams and working with service management and cloud operations at Maersk and Kraftvaerk. In his former roles he focused on building reliable, people-friendly, IT environments. His approach to technology has always been simple – IT should make life easier, not more complicated. Processes, in his view, only have value if they help people to achieve something meaningful, otherwise, they’re just paperwork with better formatting. This philosophy is welcomed at Dyalog Ltd.

Before joining Dyalog Ltd, Martin had spent years discussing IT philosophies, the importance of good service, and occasionally how many gadgets one person can reasonably own with Stine, our CEO. When the opportunity came to turn those conversations into action, he joined the team and quickly discovered that working at Dyalog Ltd can be just as entertaining as it is technical. That said, one part of the job came with unintended consequences. During the hiring discussions, Martin asked Stine whether they could exercise together, to motivate him to get to the gym more often. This has now evolved into a twice-weekly gym partnership, which he suspects is less “light encouragement” and more “mandatory strength training”.

Like most people at Dyalog Ltd, Martin is not just an IT guy in a suit – he also has a secret identity! When leaving the office, Martin changes out the shirt for a hand-stitched tunic, turning into the owner of The Merchants Guild – his own medieval shop offering everything a 14th-century citizen could possibly need: clothing, tools, furniture, books, and the occasional spoon. Having spent more than twenty years in the Danish medieval re-enactment community, he founded the shop to give something back — and possibly to justify owning far more wooden chests than anyone reasonably should.

When not working, Martin is happiest creating something new, whether it’s a piece of furniture, a bit of code, or a castle in Minecraft. He enjoys the challenge of turning an idea into something tangible, preferably with a practical twist.

In many ways, that blend of curiosity and craftsmanship makes him a good fit for Dyalog Ltd. Whether he’s fine-tuning IT infrastructure or constructing a medieval bench, Martin approaches it all with the same philosophy: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, preferably with a hint of character and a cold can of Coca-Cola.

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Employee Spotlight: Andrea

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When Andrea joined Dyalog Ltd a year ago, she quite literally took up residence next to Stine, as they shared a desk in the 4 by 3 metre office that Stine and Martina worked in. That changed in March, when Andrea oversaw moving the Copenhagen branch of Dyalog Ltd from an office hotel into a three-room office of their own. Handling the move was one of her first big tasks, apart from co-organising our internal company meetings. Now everyone in Copenhagen has room to work, and there’s even room for visitors! There are, of course, also 401 small ducks and four regular sized ducks.

“In some ways, it doesn’t feel like it’s only been a year. I feel like I’ve been at Dyalog Ltd forever – in a good way!” Andrea says, before continuing “but on the other hand, I still have so much to learn, so I also still feel quite new. Next year will be my first user meeting, for example, so I’m looking forward to taking part in that.”

When not working, Andrea enjoys creating delicious treats for sharing with family and friends

Trying to summarise the last year can be hard. “My days are varied, and I do a lot of different things. Some days I do accounts, plan meetings, and write up minutes. Others I advise on communication and presentations, draft new processes, and facilitate discussions. This is part of what I like about working at Dyalog Ltd. I always have a plan for what I want to get done when I start my day. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes, other things turn out to be more pressing. I like the unpredictability, and I like trying to navigate that, keeping clarity high and chaos low.”

As an executive assistant, Andrea is involved in multiple varied projects across Dyalog Ltd, helping Stine and her colleagues wherever she can. “That’s how I like it, really. I like helping. I think it’s as basic as that. My best days and proudest moments are when I make it easier for others to do their job or make them feel more ready to give a presentation.”

Andrea plans to spend the next many years at Dyalog Ltd, doing exactly what she’s doing now. “It seems that as soon as I’ve finished one task, two more have appeared on my list, so I don’t fear running out of work. I’m excited to keep working on my tasks in communication, administration, and management support. Dyalog Ltd is a really warm and welcoming place to work, and even though most of my colleagues are far away physically, they are never far away socially or mentally.”

Updating us on her time outside of work, Andrea must admit that she still doesn’t spend as much time sipping coffee and reading the newspaper as she would like. She tends to pack her schedule tight, but her new goal is to only have two social events per week, leaving time for calling friends, spending time with her partner and hopefully some of that quiet reading time!

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DYNA Fall 2025 – A Review

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DYNA Fall 2025 brought together APL enthusiasts, customers, and Dyalog Ltd staff for two days of presentations and workshops in New York City. Attendance was strong, energy was high, and the sessions showcased both the maturity and momentum of the Dyalog ecosystem.

The event took place in the Jay Suites Conference Center at the end of September. We’d arranged a bigger venue this time, but it was still filled to capacity! There were eight members of Team Dyalog present, and the European contingent gathered at Brian Becker’s house for a few days beforehand for a “Conclave”. As we’re a geographically-distributed team, we try to take the opportunities that present themselves to work together in person – our thanks to Brian for hosting.

Day 1: Presentations

The Dyalog Road Map – Fall 2025 Edition
Morten Kromberg

First impressions: so many people! Old friends, new acquaintances, and a palpable buzz in the air. Our CTO, Morten, started proceedings with his customary roadmap and vision – what have we done, what are we doing now, and where are we going next. He highlighted both the necessary Sisyphean work, such as the ongoing improvements and interfaces to other systems, and the more exciting developments, such as new language features (array and namespace notation, ⎕VSET, ⎕VGET, and inline tracing). Morten emphasised our growth, in terms of both revenue and staff. He introduced our newest hires, including Asher Harvey-Smith, whose first day happened to be today!

Dyalog and AI
Stefan Kruger

Following Morten’s presentation, Stefan talked about Dyalog and AI. AI is a hot topic that impacts most companies in some way, but, as a minority language, LLM performance has been poor in APL. Stefan’s talk covered some of the recent developments in the field, highlighting the fact that frontier models today are capable of explaining even quite complex APL code correctly, but that they still struggle to write code unaided. He demonstrated an LLM agent capable of executing code, running tests, and reading documentation – showing that while this improved performance, we’re far off the productivity improvements that a Python developer could expect.

JAWS – Jarvis And WebSockets
Brian Becker

Brian took over to present JAWS. No, not the 70s movie, but the WebSocket extension to Jarvis: JAWS = Jarvis And Web Sockets (Jarvis is our web service framework). He outlined the different use cases for HTTP, and contrasted those against the use cases for which you need something else, and how websockets can fill that function. Brian showed some practical examples on how websockets are used, and how the websocket functionality slots neatly into Jarvis.

A Dyalog Interface to Kafka
Martina Crippa

Martina introduced us to Apache Kafka, an event-streaming platform widely used as a backbone in the data infrastructure in large organisations, such as banks. Large cloud providers often use Kafka as the glue between their services. Martina has been working on a Dyalog interface to Kafka. She explained why it matters, and demonstrated the APL Kafka API live. The Dyalog Kafka interface is being built primarily in response to customer requests, but it’s fully open source and we will be offering optional paid support packages for those that so wish.

Static Analysis of APL for Tooling and Compliance
Aaron Hsu and Brandon Wilson

The morning finished with Aaron and Brandon talking about the Static Analysis project. Static Analysis is becoming increasingly important, especially in regulated industries, where compliance demands for such checks percolate through all the way down to platform vendors. They demonstrated the principles upon which the Dyalog Static Analyser is being built: the parser from the Co-Dfns compiler, which has been extended to handle the whole of Dyalog APL. A clear visualisation of how the static analyser’s rules select features from the analysed code showcased the powerful potential that this approach promises. Presenting as a double-act performance is hard to get right, but Aaron’s and Brandon’s presentation went down well. Static analysis is challenging at the best of times, but demand is particularly acute in finance, where regulatory compliance drives tooling requirements.

Lessons Learned when Converting from APL+Win to Dyalog APL
Alex Holtzapple of Metsim International (MSI)

METSIM® is an all-in-one solution for mining and metallurgical operations; it is used in 57(!) different countries around the world – “in the remotest corners of the map”, as Alex put it. Over the past 18 months, Alex and MSI have worked closely with us to migrate METSIM® from APL+Win to Dyalog. After introducing himself and METSIM®, Alex described the process of working with Dyalog Ltd. He had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve: he specifically wanted to preserve the UI’s design as it stands, because that places less of a burden on customers to modify their workflows and established processes. The migration has been a successful project, and the Dyalog-based product is now in the hands of their customers. Both MSI and Dyalog Ltd learned important lessons from the migration project. Alex said that they’d thought about this migration project for a long time, but what finally swung the decision was a visit to our HQ in Bramley, UK, to “look the team in the eye”.

Dyalog APL: Our (Not So) Secret Ingredient
Mark Wolfson of BIG

Mark Wolfson told us how they’re disrupting the jewellery business, and how Dyalog is forming a central component in this. BIG’s stack is a great example of a modern, heterogeneous services architecture: by the very nature of the business, they need to be able to consume data from a multitude of diverse systems and protocols. After this data has been transformed into a common format, it is then consumed by several internal systems to “derive insight from chaos”. BIG has always been an APL promoter, and Mark is doubling down on this. BIG is increasingly reliant on APL, and they’re investing significantly in their capabilities.

The Data Science Journey
Josh David

Josh talked us through Dyalog’s data science journey. Dyalog APL has long been a natural fit for data analysis, long before the term ‘Data Science’ became fashionable. Today, the field is – like so many others – dominated by Python and R. At Dyalog Ltd, we firmly believe that we have a role to play in this space, and we’re actively trying to attract new practitioners. Josh recounted his experience exhibiting at the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), Nashville, together with Martina Crippa, Rich Park, and Steve Mansour. There was a lot of interest from delegates, especially when walked through the extremely compact formulation of the k-means clustering algorithm in APL. A renewed focus on the Data Science application of Dyalog APL will inevitably impact our development roadmap – we need to improve both our data ingest story, and the raw performance in some key areas.

Josh also showcased Steve Mansour’s statistics package TamStat. TamStat is primarily intended as a package for teaching statistics, but it has several other interesting facets, too: it can be used as a library for statistics routines that you can use in your own applications (it’s open source), and also as a “statistics DSL” – a compact, dedicated way to express and evaluate statistics formulae.

What Can Vectorised Trees Do For You?
Asher Harvey-Smith

Asher is the newest member of Team Dyalog, and he has started his role by giving a presentation and hosting a workshop on the first two days of his employment! However, his association with Dyalog Ltd goes back longer than that, as he has previously completed two internships (the second as “senior intern”), and is already a seasoned presenter (he stepped up to the podium at the Dyalog ’24 user meeting in Glasgow). Asher wants to popularise the tree manipulation techniques used in the Co-Dfns compiler and also in the static analyser. Through a set of clear examples and animations, Asher has found a great pedagogical treatment of a set of techniques that many people have had difficulties grappling with. Asher also outlined when the “parent vector” technique is not appropriate.

ArrayLab: Building a 3D APL Game with raylibAPL
Holden Hoover, University of Waterloo

Holden Hoover, the inaugural APL Forge winner in 2024, demonstrated a 3D game called ArrayLab that he’s been building on top of Brian Ellingsgaard’s raylibAPL (Brian is also a former summer intern at Dyalog Ltd). One purpose for developing the ArrayLab game was to test the raylibAPL bindings whilst simultaneously exercising the Dyalog interpreter. When working with native extensions there are a lot of things that can go wrong! Holden also had to learn a lot about game development, in particular in-game physics. The ArrayLab game is a work in progress, but he showed a live walk-through of his progress so far, demonstrating correct physics and collision detection.

The APL Trust US
Diane Hymas and Mark Wolfson, The APL Trust US

The first day concluded with Diane Hymas and Mark Wolfson reporting on the progress they, together with a wider team, have been able to make on the APL Trust US. The purpose of the APL trust is to “give back” to the community. If you have an idea for something that you want to do with APL, you can apply for funding help from the APL Trust – the application process is being formalised at the moment. The good news from Diane was that the APL Trust is now launched as a registered tax-deductible charity.

Socialising!

An important part of multi-day gatherings of this kind is the impromptu hallway encounters – networking opportunities where like-minded people meet and learn from one another. After the presentations had completed, we retreated to the Yard House restaurant a few blocks up the road for dinner, conversation, and making friends. For several of us, this was our first visit to New York, and taking in the sights and sounds of Times Square at night is definitely an experience!

Day 2: Workshops

Tuesday was workshop day. We had a packed programme across two streams. In the morning, you could choose between learning how to use Jarvis with Brian and Stefan, or a deep-dive into namespaces with Josh, Morten, and Martina.

We have found that the namespace aspect of APL is frequently misunderstood, and we’ve run the “Introduction to Namespaces” workshop a few times now. Josh was managing a full house, with Morten and Martina assisting. In the room next door, Brian gave a hands-on, practical introduction to Jarvis and JAWS, with detailed explanations of the different use cases. Jarvis is already a core component in many users’ deployed Dyalog applications; with the introduction of web socket support, Jarvis/JAWS will find its way into more application deployments.

In the afternoon you could choose between learning how to use Link with instruction from Morten and Stefan, or an introduction to the key operator with Asher, who also attracted a full house.

Key is one of the advanced operators in Dyalog APL, and mastery unlocks a lot of applications, especially in the Data Science domain. Simplifying hugely, the science goes to the left and the data goes to the right! Asher had a job on his hands teaching such a large group with a range of abilities, but he was ably assisted by Martina and Josh. Next door, Morten was helping the group through gradually more complex source code scenarios with Link. Link is now into its fourth major version, and a mature workflow component that lets Dyalog users take advantage of a range of external tools that are expecting to operate on text files, such as Git, GitHub, VS Code, and many others.

In Conclusion…

The 2025 Fall DYNA conference was a well-attended, well-received event, with a great mix of newcomers, veterans, customers, and members of Team Dyalog. The highlights for us were the two customer presentations from Alex Holtzapple and Mark Wolfson – it is always interesting for us to see how people use our product in the field! Alex is new to Dyalog, and it was fantastic to hear him reporting such a positive experience and outcome. Although Mark has been a Dyalog user for longer, he was no less enthusiastic, and to hear that they’re really growing their APL development team is a vote of confidence. It was also great to hear how The APL Trust US is taking off.

DYNA Fall 2025 reflected our growing momentum, both in technology and community. Each talk underscored a shared commitment to pushing APL forward, not just as a language, but as a living ecosystem shaped by its practitioners.

Materials from DYNA Fall 2025 are being uploaded to the event webpage as they become available.

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