News about Dyalog

Aug 7, 2019

Dyalog '19: Preliminary Programme Now Available


Reminder: The 10% Early Bird discount expires Saturday 10 August 2019 at 23:59:59 UTC.

Nearly all of the Dyalog Team will be at Dyalog '19 in Elsinore – not just to talk about our own work, but equally importantly to listen to you, in presentations, at the dinner table and in the bar. If you'd like to push an idea that you don't think is on our radar, this is one of the best opportunities to let us know!

As usual, we'll be talking about the version of Dyalog APL released before the user meeting (17.1). This version does not break a lot of new ground in terms of new language features or system functions. Our focus has been to make Dyalog APL easier to get hold of, install and maintain – and work on filling in gaps in features that were released in recent years, where we were either forced to leave things out due to time pressure, or feedback from early adopters has helped us realise we'd missed something.

The next release – 18.0 – will be a more "normal" release, with important new features and significant performance enhancements as well. As usual, we'll be lifting the veil on these in Elsinore and asking for your opinions before the final designs settle down.

We are grateful to those users who are coming to share the experience of using Dyalog APL to solve problems. Tomas Gustafsson, the man behind the amazing StormWind boating simulator, will tell us the story of how he was able to use APL to help locate the wreck of the M/S Irma, which was lost in a storm in the Baltic and has defied all attempts at location for 50 years. Tommy Johannesen will explain how he helps feed tens of thousands of children with APL (by allowing parents to order school meals on line).

There will be talks on development tools and practices: Paul Mansour will talk about the experience of starting to use Git in anger with APL, and workflow tools that he has developed to keep life simple, and Michael Hughes will give us an update on his ⎕WC emulation toolkit, which allows existing code written for Microsoft Windows to produce GUI on many platforms.

Young people will feature prominently in this User Meeting: Several Dyalog speakers are less than 30 years old; Roberto Minervini will be back with a team of young people to run an APL Team Contest and tell us about "Teaching without Teaching". There will be a "Young APLers Panel", where we will bring together some of the youngest members of the audience to tell us how they hope to see APL evolve in the decades to come. For the 11th time, we will be awarding the Grand Prize for the Annual APL Problem-Solving Competition and hearing about learning APL from the winner!

For many, the most important reason to come to a Dyalog user meeting is the training that is available in workshops, which run all day on Sunday 8th and on the afternoon of Thursday 12th. This year, you can learn about recent language extensions, source code management with APL, cloud computing in APL, and user interface development using qWC and the new HTMLRenderer. So no matter whether your main interest is the front, back or middle of an application, there should be a course for you!

The preliminary Dyalog '19 user meeting programme is now available. The programme is still evolving and you can follow our progress on this webpage as additional speakers, titles and abstracts are confirmed.

We look forward to seeing you in Elsinore, 8-12 September!