Author Archives: Dyalog

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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Employee Spotlight: Neil

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Neil looking for (and failing to find) a photo of himself to include in this blog post…

A year passes quickly, especially when it’s your first year with a new company! Neil has now been our “JavaScript guy” in the Tools group for a full trip round the sun, and we asked him how he’s enjoyed his first twelve months. Fortunately, he seems to have settled in well – “Most of all, I don’t think any company has done as much to make me feel welcome, or to check in sometimes. Being a remote worker, that was always greatly appreciated. Also, I’ve worked for quite a few companies – so I mean it.”

For anyone considering working at Dyalog Ltd. Neil has the following advice – “Be prepared to be involved in conversations that push you to the limit of both your practical and your theoretical understanding. I mostly get to watch the APL masters work from a slight distance. If anything, that was the reason I chose to join Dyalog Ltd. The patient mentorship from Adám (and glimpses in to APL language decisions and history) has been a delight. Watching how quickly Morten can work, knowing every nook and cranny, has been… humbling. However, that’s where it’s interesting: there is so much skill and ability packed in to such a tiny company. But they’re nice people and there’s nothing to fear.”

At Dyalog Ltd, Neil mainly works on a project that will allow cross-platform ⎕WC-style interfaces, optionally remotely, and even embedded in webpages. He has also dedicated himself to steadily increase his APL skills. His broad experience with non-APL environments and languages has provided another useful outside perspective to our efforts at connecting APL with the outside world.

When not working, Neil enjoys spending time outside. He spends a lot of time in nature, walking and enjoying the lovely lakes where he lives in Germany. He likes to grow wildflowers because he hopes that they will grow without any help, but unfortunately this is not always the case and this year, he had only two flowers before August – it’s as if they hadn’t read the packet that very clearly stated that they should bloom in ‘June – July’!

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ECOOP 2025 – Presenting APL Standards and Array Notation

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The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), Europe’s longest-standing annual programming languages conference, brings together researchers, practitioners, and students to share their ideas and experiences in all topics related to programming languages, software development, systems, and applications. Every year, ECOOP happens at a new location, and this year it was held on the main campus of Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, where a quarter million people live nestled between seven mountains.A view over Bergen, Norway, showing colourful buildings, lush green trees, and a calm river winding through the city with hills in the background under a partly cloudy sky.

ECOOP 2025 took place last week, and Karta and Adám attended and presented at the Programming Language Standardization and Specification (PLSS) part. PLSS is a workshop module of the week-long ECOOP conference; a smaller group of domain experts in a more intimate setting, with enough time to ask questions and discuss content during breaks. This year’s event was arranged by Dr. Mikhail Barash, a researcher at Bergen Language Design Laboratory at University of Bergen, and Yulia Startsev who works on Firefox’s JavaScript engine at Mozilla and represents Mozilla at the standardising body for JavaScript. The audience was mostly comprised of computer scientists; predominantly academics, but also people working on language design, standards, and specifications.

Adám presented APL Array Notation (slides), in which he related the decade-long story of designing, specifying, and implementing APL’s answer to JavaScript’s JSON. Although the event’s main theme was programming language standards and the resulting APL Array Notation specification document has not yet been adopted as an official standard, it has been designed and written in a way that would facilitate this process.
Adám Brudzewsky presenting at PLSS 2025 in Bergen, Norway. He stands at a lectern in front of a projection screen showing APL code and the Dyalog version 20.0 logo, with the topic "APL Array Notation".

APL was first standardised in 1989; the latest, extended, standard was published in 2001. Karta’s presentation on APL Standards (slides) discussed how Dyalog APL conforms to the latest APL standard, differences between Dyalog APL and the versions of APL implemented by other vendors, and places where Dyalog APL diverges from the standard, along with our rationale for doing so.
Karta Kooner presenting at PLSS 2025 in Bergen, Norway. He stands beside two large screens displaying APL glyphs, with the Dyalog logo shown in the top-left corner.

Our talks were well-received, and the audience seemed engaged, asking several questions. Hopefully we have inspired some participants to look further into APL!

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Employee Spotlight: Stine

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Five years has passed since Stine joined Dyalog Ltd, and in only a few weeks she will also celebrate a year and a half as our CEO. When asked about her first five years, Stine said “Time passes very quickly when you’re having fun, so for me, this anniversary has come far sooner than I was expecting! Taking over this role from Gitte meant not rocking the boat too much – if it’s not broken, there is no reason to fix it. I do make changes though – I try to use my fresh perspective to identify places where we can improve. These changes must be made while still staying true to the Dyalog culture and making people feel safe, both within Dyalog Ltd and in our user community. I try to make small incremental changes, and give people plenty of opportunities to contribute and complain along the way.”

The most important skills for a person in Stine’s position are patience and empathy. Change can be difficult, even if it’s for the better – this is especially true at Dyalog Ltd, where Stine’s favourite part of our culture is the passion. “Every employee is passionate about the company and our product. Dyalog Ltd is not just a workplace, it is a family…a lifestyle. I try to guard that passion so that it never burns out, while feeding it new firewood in the form of good working conditions, influence on the product, and a collaborate leadership style.”

Stine works from our office in Copenhagen. It is here that her favourite ducks are – they are part of a flock of 400 mini ducks that Martina placed around the office as an April Fools joke!

When asked about her most significant project in her time at Dyalog Ltd, Stine replied “Since I became CEO, things stopped being about me. My main task is to make sure that everyone else has the chance to shine, so I have nothing that I have done on my own”. If she must identify her proudest achievement so far, it is getting everyone to arrive on time for meetings (sometimes even five minutes early!).

Even though Stine grew up with APL being the language of choice at home, she never really learnt it (despite trying multiple times), mostly because her interest lies more with people and processes. Helping people grow and making their lives easier makes Stine happy, so even though she is still being teased about her lack of APL skills(!), we can understand that she prioritises other things.

Stine is working on making Dyalog Ltd future proof. She aims to ensure that knowledge and skills are shared from the more experienced employees to the newcomers, so we can continue to operate and support our users for many years to come. We have many key people in the older generation of employees, and the challenge of externalising years of accumulated knowledge and experience is one that Stine has been happy to take on. Some of us have been with Dyalog Ltd for as long as Stine has been alive, and no single individual joining us today can possibly assume their roles without extensive mentoring and knowledge transfer. For Stine, playing role matchmaker and facilitator is both exiting and very rewarding. She plans to serve Dyalog Ltd for many years, continuing to focus on improving and simplifying our work lives, so that we can deliver a good product that remains in touch with the latest technological developments.

Outside work, Stine enjoys dancing and reading books, as well as taking care of her proudest achievement: her children. Long-standing members of the community might remember a Dyalog user meeting in Elsinore where she led a Zumba class every afternoon for the whole week; Stine still does Zumba twice a week, and it is one of the things that helps her to stay sane and in shape.

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Open Source APL Projects

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To grow the APL community, we need to make it easier for people outside the current community to become involved.

Over the last few years we have been increasing the number of our tools and libraries that are maintained as open source projects. Open source refers to software whose design and source code are publicly accessible, allowing anyone to study, modify, and share it – this fosters collaboration, transparency, and wider community participation in building and improving technology. By making more of our tools available as open source projects, we hope more people will feel able to contribute, innovate, and help shape the future of APL.

We are now inviting developers, students, and enthusiasts to contribute to the evolution and development of some of these tools and libraries, and are able to offer mentorship around some specific projects that we have identified as being of the most benefit to the wider APL community.

Why Contribute?

This is not just about publishing code, but cultivating real collaboration. APL is a powerful language, but its community is relatively small and your contributions have a visible impact. Whether you’re curious about APL or just want to contribute to a fascinating part of the programming world, this is your chance.

Explore the Projects

Open Source Software Projects introduces the projects that we have identified as being of the most benefit to the wider APL community. In addition to the project aims and description, each one includes information on the estimated workload and difficulty level. From beginner-friendly tasks to more complex challenges, there’s something for everyone. For example:

Make the TryAPL Front End Mobile-Friendly
Enhance the TryAPL web interface to provide a seamless experience on mobile devices. This involves refactoring the input system to prevent the device’s native keyboard from appearing and implementing an on-screen keyboard for APL symbols.

  • Skills Required: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and an interest in APL.
  • Estimated Workload: Medium (175 hours)
  • Difficulty Level: Medium

Dyalog Jupyter Kernel New Features
Expand the capabilities of the Dyalog Jupyter kernel. This involves implementing new features, such as Dyalog Magics, to enhance the interactive computing experience.

  • Skills Required: Python, APL, and familiarity with Jupyter notebooks.
  • Estimated Workload: Medium (175 hours).
  • Difficulty Level: Medium

Implement a New Language Backend for Co-dfns
Develop a new backend for the Co-dfns APL compiler, targeting a language of your choice (e.g., JavaScript, Python, Rust). This project offers flexibility and the opportunity to delve deep into compiler architecture.

  • Skills Required: APL, C, and proficiency in the chosen target language.
  • Estimated Workload: Long (350 hours)
  • Difficulty Level: Hard

The Dyalog OSS-Projects GitHub repository includes information on how to submit your suggestions for projects, whether it’s something you would like to work on or not.

Get Involved

We encourage contributors at all levels to participate – whether you’re a seasoned developer or new to open source, you are very welcome and there is a place for you. The community is active on GitHub Discussions and there are also many other places where you can chat with people, ask questions, share ideas, and collaborate with mentors and peers (for example, the APL Orchard).

Our open source initiative is more than just a list of projects; it’s an invitation to be part of a vibrant community pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with APL. Whether you’re looking to contribute to existing tools, explore the depths of compiler design, or simply learn a new language, there’s an opportunity waiting for you.

Ready to get started? Explore the projects and start contributing today!

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DYNA Spring 2025: A Review

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Earlier this month we hosted a DYNA (Dyalog North America) event. We returned to the same venue as DYNA24, and again had a capacity crowd.

The day started with an update from our CTO, Morten Kromberg, regarding the latest developments at Dyalog Ltd – both within the company and with Dyalog and its associated offerings. One notable change is a transition in how we will provide the documentation. From Dyalog v20.0, we are moving towards using open-source markdown-based documentation on GitHub. The benefits of this approach are improved searching functionality and the ability for more people, internal and external, to contribute. If you see an issue with the documentation, you can raise a GitHub issue or even submit a correction as a pull request.

Several new tools are in progress, including:

  • an interface to Apache Kafka, which is a popular open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies.
  • a tool to perform static analysis of APL code that will detect vulnerabilities and other bad practices. This will help our customers adhere to “best practices” for software vulnerability analysis.
  • leveraging AI both to help our customers develop APL code and to help them use AI in their own applications.

Morten then spoke about the current and forthcoming versions of Dyalog, sharing the highlights of v19.0, reviewing v19.4.1(!), and previewing v20.0, which will be available later this year. Among its many features are two highly anticipated ones:

  • Array notation – this will have a significant impact on how arrays can be specified in code. Creating namespaces is now particularly easy, as rather than creating a namespace and subsequently assigning values in the namespace, they can be completely specified in notation.
  • Inline tracing – this will allow the developer to trace each element of an APL expression, displaying information about left and right arguments, operands, and so on. This should help make understanding long or dense lines of APL code much easier.

Morten’s second presentation focused on efforts to provide sets of migration tools for two different purposes – to migrate applications that are currently using Dyalog’s ⎕WC to non-Windows platforms, and to migrate applications written in other APL implementations to Dyalog APL.

EWC (Everywhere Window Create) is intended to be as syntactically identical to ⎕WC as possible to simplify the process of enabling existing ⎕WC applications to run on platforms other than Microsoft Windows with virtually no changes. EWC uses HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in the HTMLRenderer or a browser to render the GUI. This opens up the possibility for users to integrate other JavaScript libraries, inject custom CSS, or develop custom controls to add additional GUI elements beyond those that ⎕WC can provide alone. Neil Kirsopp is our resident JavaScript expert, and is leading the client side of EWC. Morten showed screenshots of an existing ⎕WC application and its EWC equivalent, as well as a new EWC application that he developed to help track the administrative work necessary for maintenance and scheduling of the sailing ship he co-owns.

Morten Kromberg presenting at the DYNA Spring 2025 APL event in New York City. He is pointing at a screen displaying a sailing ship interface, which includes ropes, rigging, and a schooner in the background.

Photo by Devon McCormick

Morten next discussed source code migration from APL+Win to Dyalog APL. The challenge of migrating a “living” application where changes are being made to the APL+Win code while it is also being converted to Dyalog APL has resulted in a methodology using code in parallel text files, using Git for source code management. A framework to translate the syntactic incongruities between the two APLs has been developed. Perhaps the most daunting difference lies in the GUI architectures. APL+Win uses ⎕WI where Dyalog APL uses ⎕WC. A new tool that we have developed to ameliorate this is ∆WI, which is a ⎕WI emulator that uses ⎕WC under the covers. Although work is not yet complete, the pilot customer is very pleased with the migration effort and the performance of ∆WI.

Morten also noted that many ∆WI-based applications can run using EWC and, therefore, should be able to run in the cloud. Davin Church (Creative Software Design), with his extensive APL+Win experience as well as his Dyalog experience, has been enlisted to help develop ∆WI. At this point, Davin joined Morten and mentioned that when he compared Dyalog’s APL-based equivalents to APL+Win’s C-based “fastfns”, the Dyalog code typically ran slightly faster.

Mark Wolfson (BIG) spoke about how Dyalog is used within his company. BIG has revolutionised the Jewelry industry, and their product is known for accommodating and handling many different input files and formats from jewellery shops across the USA. Mark is quick to advocate for, and experiment with, some of the newest Dyalog features. Now with Jarvis and EWC, he has been able to very quickly deploy new front-end features to his customers, sometimes sometimes even while they are describing their problem to him over the phone! This is in stark contrast to trying to create a ticket to get the same features built and created by the C# development team.

Mark Wolfson speaking at the DYNA Spring 2025 APL event in New York City. He gestures with a presentation remote while discussing a topic, with a whiteboard containing Wi-Fi details in the background.

Brian Becker then presented “The Many Faces of Jarvis”. Jarvis is Dyalog’s web service framework that can be used to deliver JSON or REST-based web services – it provides a mechanism for clients to access your APL code over the net without them having to know anything about APL. Since its inception, Jarvis has become a key component of many Dyalog projects, both internally and amongst our customers. Brian described how features have been added to Jarvis in direct response to customer needs.

Josh Davis showcased some of the tools and functionality that are used in day-to-day development. He decided to live dangerously, and demonstrated this by working out a problem in real time using some of the public datasets made available by New York City. He did an analysis and produced a report of tree data (the plant, not the datatype!) across the five boroughs. It involved the use of some newer primitives such as the key and at operators, other system functions for reading/writing files, the HTMLRenderer and a JavaScript plotting library, COM for Microsoft Windows automation, .NET for cryptography routines, SQAPL for database access, HttpCommand for web requests, and ⎕R for regular expressions support. All these tools come with a Dyalog installation.

Josh David presenting at the DYNA Spring 2025 APL event in New York City. He is seated in front of a large screen displaying a slide titled "Leveraging Community Packages," which lists various technologies and tools used with Dyalog APL.

Photo by Devon McCormick

Max Sun (BCA Research) presented a demonstration of some of the tools he used to build the talk he gave at LambdaConf last year; he runs APL examples in a Jupyter Notebook, using SharpPlot for plots.

Brian and Mark presented thoughts and developments on Dyalog and AI. Brian posed two questions:

  • How can Dyalog use AI to help our customers?
    • Making documentation easier to search and navigate
    • Explaining what a piece of APL code is doing
    • Generating APL code
  • What can Dyalog do to help our customers use AI?
    • What tools can we provide to help our customers to integrate AI into their applications

Integrating APL and AI faces several challenges. Firstly, there’s very little APL with which to train Large Language Models (LLMs), especially compared to languages like Python and JavaScript. This can lead to frequent “hallucinations”, where the LLM just makes something up. Secondly, APL is not a focus for AI purveyors. Although there is documentation and packages for Python and other language to interface to LLMs, it’s up to us to develop them for APL.

Brian demonstrated a Google NotebookLM, into which much of the Dyalog documentation had been uploaded. This provided “context” for the LLM, which made the search results more accurate and applicable. Next came a demonstration of Cursor, which is essentially Anthropic’s Claude LLM integrated within Visual Studio Code. Brian provided a dfn and asked what the code did. The response was impressively accurate. He then loaded the HttpCommand git repository and asked for a summary – again the results were impressive. Brian then showed how he asked an LLM to write a simple piece of APL code. The LLM got it wrong, which Brian pointed out. This went through several iterations, with the LLM profusely apologising for its mistakes as it went on to generate another, different, mistake! It should be noted that different LLMs will perform better or worse depending on what body of material they have been trained on, and new, better, LLMs are being rolled out all the time.

Brian has used HttpCommand to develop interfaces to OpenAI‘s and Anthropic’s APIs. Many LLMs are OpenAI compatible, which means their API is very similar to OpenAI’s. Developing and documenting interfaces to LLMs will continue to be a focus. Mark discussed how AI could be useful at BIG, citing real-world use cases to balance inventory, improve look-ups, and provide alternative items based on their attributes and photographic similarity. Mark also raised the question of using commercial cloud-based AI for proprietary data. How private and secure is your intellectual property?

Brian’s presentation on “The APL Ecosystem” highlighted the online resources that exist to help people learn APL and participate in, and contribute to, the APL community. The single most useful resource seems to be the APL Wiki, but there is also TryAPL, APLCart, APL videos on YouTube, APL-related GitHub repositories, Hacker News, the APL Orchard on Stack Exchange, the APL Farm on Discord, the APL Challenge, the APL Forge, and various APL-related presentations at LambdaConf, Functional Conf, and PLDI.

To close the event, Diane Hymas asked everyone to “remember how you felt the day you discovered APL”. This was her lead-in to introducing The APL Trust – a non-profit entity aiming to promote awareness and use of the APL programming language by funding APL projects, especially in the areas of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Although the initial plan was to have one global fund, for tax purposes it was more expedient to start with a US fund, with other related funds in the UK and EU to follow. Hopefully the APL Trust will become an incubator of some great new APL ideas and software!

After the day’s scheduled agenda, most of the attendees walked around the corner to the Yard House for dinner and drinks. All in all, the day was fun, informative, and a great opportunity to interact with other APL enthusiasts.

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All the presentation materials from DYNA Spring 2025 can be downloaded.

DYNA Fall 2025 will take place on 29-30 September – register for updates as information becomes available.

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