Dyalog ’23 Day 1: Welcome to Denmark!

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We have returned to the (very windy this time!) shores of Elsinore in Denmark for our annual user meeting, Dyalog ’23!

Today saw the usual range workshops in which everybody could get involved learning the intricacies of a range of topics with the support of experts from Team Dyalog and friends.

In the morning, users in part 1 of the Projects and Packages workshop started consuming APL packages using the Tatin package manager. While many existing users have gone decades without these very convenient additions, we see packages as an important part of APL’s future.

In the Tacit Techniques workshop, participants learned the basics of function composition operators and function train syntax. They practised spotting patterns to make explicit code more succinct, and even those who only started using APL earlier this year had great success converting explicit functions into those that do not mention their arguments.

Meanwhile, users who wanted a challenge tackled an advanced workshop focussing on common pitfalls when writing code that performs well.

Projects and Packages workshop with Morten Kromberg, Kai Jaeger, and Gilgamesh Athoraya

In the afternoon, we hit the rate limit on the GitHub API during the session on web services, as presumably everyone on the venue’s Wi-Fi network had the same I.P. address! Fortunately, after each user successfully configured a web service on their own machine, everyone could experiment as much as they wanted to.

In part 2 of the Projects and Packages workshop, participants managed to publish their own APL packages to the Tatin test registry for others to use. Now that they’ve had a taste, we hope to see more become available on the main Tatin registry in the future!

The development masterclass took participants through some basic and some lesser-known features of Dyalog’s Integrated Development Environments. Some newer APLers said that they learned a lot, and even more experienced users said they had benefitted and would take the materials back to their organisations to share with others.

Adám Brudzewsky and Stefan Kruger host a masterclass on the features of the IDEs

Conversation over dinner included catching up with long-time friends and making new ones, stories of onboarding new APLers (some of them in attendance), and hearing about personal and professional achievements of the last few years. There’s excitement in the air this evening, and we can’t wait to start a fantastic few days of presentations tomorrow!

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Welcome Stefan Kruger

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Stefan Kruger recently joined Dyalog Ltd from IBM, where he worked on distributed databases for many years.

Stefan spent a long time at university doing research in signal processing; after that he worked in several start-ups that were closely tied to the academic world. Then, taking a step away from technology for a while, Stefan pursued his interests in climbing and skiing, chasing winter around the globe until the money ran out.

Once safely back in gainful employment, Stefan set himself a goal of learning a new programming language each year, favouring those that are less mainstream…”the weirder, the better!”. This path has led him through such languages as Zig, Clojure, Elixir, Racket, Haskell, and many more. Once he discovered APL he was hooked. Recognising the need for more accessible resources while learning APL, Stefan wrote Learning APL, an introductory book for programmers familiar with other languages; he also edited together APL Cultivations, which covers most aspects of basic APL programming as well as some more in-depth lessons.

Stefan lives in Bristol with his wife Sarah, two cats, one dog, and n+1 bikes. He enjoys back country skiing in arctic Scandinavia or Canada during his winter holidays. In the summer, he stays active by road biking, especially climbing the classic cols in the Alps — strictly “type 2” fun.

We’re glad to have Stefan on board at Dyalog Ltd; his background and drive for continuous learning should be a positive contribution to our team, and we look forward to seeing his contributions to the APL community.

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Employee Spotlight: Peter

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This week marks the first anniversary of Peter joining Dyalog Ltd. He is one of the newest additions to Team Dyalog and we couldn’t be more excited for his future here. We were able to pry him away from the interpreter to catch up with him and see what his time has been like so far.

Peter joined Team Dyalog after studying at Aalborg University, where he received his Bachelor’s degree in computer science. APL made an impression on him when he heard about it in 2021; he found it fresh and pleasantly new. APL (and Dyalog APL) were different from other programming languages he had dealt with.

Most days Peter is deeply involved with Dyalog’s interpreter; he improves it by implementing cool new features and fixing any annoying bugs. Peter really enjoys the affable and cooperative culture here at Dyalog Ltd, “It is a very friendly crowd, and everyone is willing to help me with whatever issue comes up.” He also enjoys his role in the development team. He finds it challenging and fulfilling to work on issues that require him to look at and understand a part of code that he hasn’t seen before…it’s like solving a puzzle for him, and when things start to ‘click’ he gets really motivated because he knows, “that the system is becoming more and more robust with every bug fix.” Peter’s role requires a lot of critical thinking, “I think the most important skill is to be able to navigate and make sense of old code on your own.”

When he’s not improving the heart of Dyalog, you can find Peter spending his time outside! (I know, shocking for a programmer!) He enjoys scenic walks in the picturesque nature local to him in Denmark, which is a huge juxtaposition from staring at screens for a living.

Peter is a great addition to the team, and we wish him all the best on his one-year anniversary at Dyalog Ltd.

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Welcome Jada Andrade

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Jada moved to the United Kingdom in 2015 to pursue a degree in law with politics at the University of Manchester. On graduation she relocated to Reading in the south of England, where she took on various temporary positions in administration during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Jada first heard about APL when her partner, Rich Park, joined Dyalog Ltd in October 2018. Since then, she has attended various Dyalog Ltd events as a guest, including Dyalog ’19 and Dyalog ’22, and found the enthusiasm and passion of the APL community infectious, despite having little to no experience in computing. Attending these events left Jada with a very positive impression of Dyalog Ltd, particularly with the logistical planning and administrative organization evident from the smooth running of each event. She was also in the unique position of being able to interact with Dyalog Ltd employees prior to joining the company, fostering good relationships through casual communication.

Therefore, when the possibility of joining Team Dyalog as an administration assistant and office manager was brought up, she immediately jumped on the opportunity and officially joined the company towards the end of March 2023. She hopes to lessen the current workload of the administration team, and enjoys the varied nature of her role as she gets to explore legal, finance, customer relations and office management tasks.

Outside work, Jada enjoys improving her running skills, taking long walks in the bountiful nature of Berkshire, occasionally canoeing, discovering cool Japanese manga, and making delicious dishes in the kitchen.

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Formal Proposal for APL Array Notation – Seeking Feedback

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One of the defining features of the APL language is the ability to denote numeric vectors directly through juxtaposition — separating the elements by spaces, as in 0 1 1 2 3 5 8. The notation for character “vectors” is similar to that for “strings” in most other languages, using quotes to denote the start and end of a list of characters. When generalised arrays were added to the language in the early 1980s, the most popular APL dialects extended the vector notation to allow nested arrays to be written using so-called strand notation, allowing the juxtaposition of sub‑expressions producing arrays to form a one-dimensional array — as in:

      (2+2) (FOO 42) MAT

Strand notation works well for small, relatively simple one-dimensional arrays. As soon as arrays are too large to be represented on a single line of code, deeply nested, rank greater than one, or (in APL systems that support them) contain namespaces or objects, APL requires the use of primitives or system functions to assemble them from simple components.

The flexibility of the APL language has allowed many APL programmers to work around the issue, either by implementing custom array notations or by using the ability of most APL interpreters to simply store arrays within saved workspaces without having an actual source form of the data. Within specific applications, domain specific notations can be very successful, but readability is poor for anyone not trained in the specific variation used — or who is missing the tooling required to interpret them — as well as sometimes having significant run-time cost.

Recently, the need for a better notation for arrays has grown within the Dyalog APL community:

  • The switch to text-based sources means that arrays that represent constants, enumerations or initial values — that arguably constitute part of the source of an application — need a textual representation if they are to be managed using the same tools as functions and operators.
  • The increased use of namespaces and name/value pairs as arguments to both user-defined and system functions makes the lack of a good notation for namespaces painful.

Dyalog Ltd intends to implement core language support for a notation that makes it possible to write most arrays literally, without requiring the use of primitive functions, over multiple lines of source where this increases readability. It can be used to write nested arrays, and arrays of rank greater than one. The notation also describes many namespaces/objects, providing both inline and anonymous definitions.

Acknowledgements

Although I used the word “recently” above, the foundations for the notation which gradually evolved into the proposal that we are publishing today were laid by Phil Last at Dyalog’15 in Sicily. At Dyalog, Adam Brudzewsky has been the torch bearer and is the author of the current proposal. We would also like to recognise the contributions of Marshall Lochbaum and dzaima, who have acted as sounding boards and have implemented notations similar to that proposed here in the APL-derivative BQN and in dzaima/APL respectively.

Download the full proposal document

Experimentation within Dyalog APL

Experimental implementations using APL models are available within some tools in the Dyalog eco-system, such as the Link tool (which supports the representation of code and data in Unicode text files) and the functions Serialise and Deserialise within the namespace ⎕SE.Dyalog.Array. You can also try it out in the interactive online sandbox.

Providing feedback

Dyalog Ltd is keen to have feedback from the array language community on the notation proposed here, so that we can feel confident about the design before we proceed with our implementation. Our hope is that we will be able to keep the differences between future array notations within the family of array languages to a minimum.

You can leave feedback below or in the APL Orchard chatroom, the APL Farm’s #apl channel, the r/apl and r/apljk subreddits, and the comp.lang.apl newsgroup, all of which we will monitor. (See APL Wiki for information about these forums.) In addition, we have created a topic in our own forum. If you prefer not to comment publicly, then please send comments by e-mail. We will update the discussion page for APL Wiki’s Array notation design considerations article to contain a record of significant feedback.

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11 April 2023 – A Day to Celebrate!

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Today we reach two very significant milestones.

40 Years of Dyalog APL

On this day, we have cause for celebration: it is 40 years since the release of Dyalog version 1.0! Geoff Streeter would say that from his perspective we are already in the 42nd year, as he and John Scholes started work on the new interpreter in 1981. On the other hand, Pete Donnelly might argue that the interpreter wasn’t really ready for serious use until a few years after that date. The fact remains that the APL ’83 conference in Washington DC saw the first official release of the product, and is considered to be the “birth” of Dyalog APL.

Farewell Geoff Streeter

On the same day, we also congratulate Geoff Streeter, the last Dyalog developer who will have worked on the interpreter throughout its existence, on the first day of his retirement. We are happy to be able to report that, unlike John Scholes who designed and built version 1.0 together with Geoff but sadly passed away in 2019, Geoff is retiring in good health. We wish him many happy years in retirement in the company of his wife Sarah, children and grandchildren – although we are also hoping that he will pop by the Dyalog office from time to time to let us know how he thinks we are doing, and hopefully also join us at some future user meetings!

Continuity

It is impossible to exaggerate the value of the dedication and continuity that Geoff and John provided to Dyalog over these four decades. In the early days, when company finances were shaky, they sometimes continued work on the interpreter without compensation. Today, we are still blessed with many team members who have worked for Dyalog for most, if not all, of their careers – although we are doing what we can to avoid the need for the extremes of dedication that were required in the early days.

Good Choices

Dyalog APL started its life as a unique combination of what was to become the leading nested array paradigm (APL2/NARS floating arrays) coupled with what John and Geoff (and the rest of the consulting team at Dyadic Systems Ltd) thought were the best “commercial” extensions selected from APL systems developed by STSC and I.P.Sharp Associates (component files and control structures from STSC, error trapping from IPSA, and many other features).

The early choices have stood the test of time, and paved the way for Dyalog to become extremely competitive when Windows 3.1 and John Daintree arrived at the same time – resulting in the extremely easy-to-use Win32 GUI support. In typical fashion, the team did not merely implement a tool for GUI programming, they adopted an approach that led to the very general notion of namespaces, which meant that the same architecture could be used to interface to COM/OLE and subsequently .NET and complete support for object-oriented programming in Dyalog.

UNIX

Geoff was (and is) very much a UNIX man, and the first versions of Dyalog were built for the small UNIX machines that Dyadic Systems expected to take over from the mainframe. Unfortunately, UNIX was slow to gain acceptance and, around 1990 when UNIX was finally starting to take off, Microsoft Windows arrived and the centre of gravity of the commercial business shifted in that direction. Geoff was often heard muttering to himself about how the company was making poor technical choices, driven by what he referred to as “commercial” pressure. He kept his head down, and ensured the UNIX implementations were well supported and that all designs took the needs of these platforms into account.

Users of UNIX-based Dyalog can be grateful for Geoff’s unwavering enthusiasm. And Dyalog too: not only is the IBM AIX version of APL still a significant source of revenue, the ease with which we have been able to add support for Linux and macOS is very much down to our long UNIX history and the goal of maintaining cross-platform compatibility, throughout the history of the product.

Dedication

As a further example of Geoff’s dedication: as a young man with a motorcycle and a keen sense of community, Geoff started riding at night, delivering blood from blood banks to hospitals where it was urgently needed. He started doing this in 1980, just after he started at Dyadic Systems, and, although he is retiring from Dyalog today, Geoff will continue as a volunteer for SERV S&L. Although he no longer rides his bike, he now acts as the controller for the new generation of riders. In October 2021, SERV S&L was presented with The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service by the Lord Lieutenant of Surrey.

The Future

In the same way that Geoff has not been riding his bike at night, he has not been doing any new development on Dyalog for the last year. Instead, he has been preparing and holding internal presentations to a new generation of Dyalog developers, providing insight into the work that he has done over the last four decades. Ultimately an impossible task of course, but at least they now know where to start digging – and Geoff is still around to answer questions in an emergency if we offer him a cup of coffee and three plain chocolate digestives (his stated minimum requirement to come into the office!).

As Dyalog enters its fifth decade, all parts of Dyalog Ltd. (including the development team) are larger – and broader – than they have ever been. The good choices made by Geoff, John, Pete, and many others in the early years are holding up, and the company continues to grow.

Many thanks to Geoff from everyone at Dyalog Ltd. We will do our best to allow him to relax, enjoy his well-deserved retirement, and look forward to continued dividend payments from the Dyalog shares in his pension fund!

References:

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