Tuesday 26 May 2009

APL in the Real World – Conference to Focus on Application Development in the Coming Decade

For the first time in 10 years, the British APL Association is bringing all major vendors of terse software development languages together for insight and trends in fast application development and domain expert collaboration.

London 26th May 2009: The British APL Association (BAA) has announced their BAPLA09 conference which will give British software developers - and members of the BAA in particular - an opportunity to meet and discuss with the major vendors of Array Languages.

Paul Grosvenor, Chairman of the BAA says, “We feel that the APL languages have been overlooked massively over the past few years although the BAA has always provided a good forum for networking in smaller groups. However, more recently, we have noticed an increasing demand from many organisations, including large corporate entities within Finance and Engineering, particularly when it has come to integrating a larger degree of domain expert knowledge in the development process. With the increased development of web-based applications we have also seen some really fast tracked and successful applications spring up over the past 2-3 years. This is the direct background for wanting to bring together all the major vendors of APL languages for the first time in 10 years”.

The BAPLA conference follows closely in the footsteps of the QCon conference in London earlier this spring and particularly the track “Emerging languages in the Enterprise”. Ola Bini of Sweden hosted this track and he was quoted saying that programming languages generally are poor (or very poor) and he specifically wanted better programming languages which are less directed towards compilers and much more directed to facilitate better communication between developers and domain experts. APL has always been recognised as being exceptionally good at introducing domain expert knowledge into the development process.

The Vendors of APL programming languages presenting at the BAPLA09 conference include: UK based Dyalog Ltd and MicroAPL Ltd, US based APL 2000, J Software Inc and KX Systems. Other presentations will give insight into some of the new successful applications such as The Childcare Company’s online learning solution for Nursery Staff – LASAR, Bio-Check – an application developed by Optima Systems for monitoring patients or clinical trial participants’ progress by collecting a number of bio-markers (temperature, pulse, heart rate etc.) via PDA and SmartPhones.

The delegates will also come away with at least 2 new pre-releases of software.

The BAPLA Conference takes place at Wokefield Park in Reading on June 8-9 2009. For registration and further information please visit www.BAPLA09.com

About the British APL Association - BAA
The BAA is an independent organisation formed for the purpose of furthering the use of APL or associated languages and assisting the wider APL communities where appropriate. APL stands for “Array Programming Language” - an interactive computer language noted for its elegance, conciseness and fast development speed. It is supported on most mainframes,
workstations and personal computers and these days even PDA’s and Smart phones.

The BAA produces a quarterly publication Vector which is arguably the pre-eminent magazine for all things APL. Extracts plus the archive can be found at www.vector.org.uk. The membership of the BAA covers all ability and age groups, worldwide. Various contact groups from around the world can also be identified at this site.

British APL Association - C/O Optima House - Mill Court - Spindle Way - Crawley - RH10 1TT - West Sussex - United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 (0) 1293 562 700 Fax: +44(0)1293 562 699
Website: http://www.vector.org.uk/

Wednesday 20 May 2009

First Derivatives announces BGC Adaptor

First Derivatives is pleased to announce the addition of a BGC Adaptor to its Delta product suite. The new BGC Adaptor allows clients to connect the Delta platform, which is powered by kdb+, directly to BGC Partners' eSpeed electronic platform for market data, execution and order routing services.

The press release announcing this addition can be viewed at: http://www.firstderivatives.com/Downloads/PR_First_Derivatives_BGC_Partners.pdf

The addition of the BGC platform to the Delta portfolio allows clients to develop fully automated trading systems across multiple global interest rate, FX and futures markets in a matter of days.

For further information on this exciting development and how it can assist your business please email bconlon@firstderivatives.com or bfitzpatrick@firstderivatives.com

Annual General Meeting 2009

The Annual General Meeting of the British APL Association will be held on Monday 8th June as part of the BAPLA 2009 Conference.

The meeting, at Wokefield Park, near Reading, will commence at 1:45 pm and will be followed by presentations from the following speakers:
  • Stephen Taylor (Lambent Technology) - Who the H*** Needs XML?
  • Sonia Beekman (APL2000) - The Product
  • Kai Jaeger (APL Team Ltd) - Presentation Technology
  • Roger Hui (JSoftware Inc) - Inner Product, An Old/New Problem
  • Simon Garland (Kx)
If you intend to come to the meeting, please notify george@optima-systems.co.uk to book your place.

For further information about the conference and directions to Wokefield Park, please visit
www.bapla09.com.

Nicholas Small
Honorary Treasurer, British APL Association

01223-570850

treasurer@vector.org.uk

Monday 18 May 2009

News from the Baltic Rim


Adrian Smith's report of last month's FinnAPL meeting in Tallinn is now online.

Sunday 17 May 2009

Masterminds of Programming

Masterminds of Programming features Adin Falkoff on the creation of APL

The APLs on YouTube

Impressed by the number of APL-related videos now on YouTube, I've addded to vector.org.uk a page indexing what I've found. More nominations welcome!

Thursday 14 May 2009

NARS2000

Bob Smith has released NARS2000, an ISO Extended APL compliant interpreter available as free open-source software for Windows platforms and platforms with Wine. (Just about any Linux machine.)

Wednesday 13 May 2009

Vector, Volume 24, N°1

has gone to the printers at last. The impatient can download it as a PDF (2.7Mb) from the front page.

“Have you ever seen anything so elegant?”

Posted online: a review of Graeme Robertson’s A Practical Introduction to APL by Rebecca Burriesci.

Burriesci is a recent Stanford CompSci graduate now working for Google. This is a rare glimpse of how we look to a new generation.

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Monday 4 May 2009

JobWatch Canada

Apologies for delay posting this, which came in 21 April:

Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
Industry:
Company Url:
Financial
http://www.cppib.ca


Department: Information Services
Reference No.: Q409-236R
Position Type: Full-time
With assets under management projected to grow to $250 billion by 2016, CPP Investment Board is one of the largest and fastest growing institutional investors in the world. Headquartered in Toronto, with offices in London and Hong Kong, the CPP Investment Board is governed and managed independently of the Canada Pension Plan by experienced and highly skilled investment professionals. Their job is to prudently invest CPP assets to help pay future pensions.

The Time Series Solutions team is looking for a forward thinking Senior Developer to help lay the foundation of a KDB-based enterprise-level time series data platform. The Time Series Solutions team is responsible for delivering time series data and related solutions and services to our business partners as well as to other groups in Information Services.

Candidates must have an Undergraduate or Graduate degree in the field of physical sciences, computer sciences, software engineering, Mathematics and/or equivalent and 7+ years of work experience within financial services, preferably investment management.

The role requires familiarity with data management systems, strong communication skills and a desire to work in a fast-paced agile-delivery environment.

Role Specific Accountabilities:

* Further the design and development of the early-stage KDB-based time series warehouse
* Collaborate with business and IS team members to conceptualize, design and develop Kdb+, Java or C++ software solutions which may include integration with database applications, web services and ESB services that support CPPIB's service oriented architecture
* Adhere to, advocate and follow development best practices
* Analyze and prepare wiki-based SDLC artifacts including system documentation and test plans and develop software in accordance with CPPIB SDLC standards
* Effectively unit test and perform integration testing on software components. Proactively assist quality assurance
* Create installation plans, validation plans and back out procedures to assist Infrastructure Management with software deployments
* Assist in the development and maintenance of a wiki shared knowledge base
* Conduct research on emerging application development software products, languages, and standards.
* Provide level II troubleshooting support on a rotational, 7x24 basis
* Other duties as assigned

If you possess the following, we'd like to hear from you:
Soft Skill Requirements

* Strong communication and interpersonal skills
* Strong problem solving skills stemming from math, physics and/or a computer science background
* Strong initiative with an ability to grasp the big picture and actively seek ways to improve the status quo
* Strong commitment to guiding principles of integrity, partnership and high performance

Technical Requirements

* 7+ years of programming experience in Java, J2EE or C++ with emphasis on server-side development of enterprise-class applications and databases
* Senior development experience with enterprise market and reference data management systems
* Coding experience with time series systems or platforms
* Exposure to the use of frameworks and open architecture designs
* Senior experience with the full software life cycle in larger collaborative development teams, with practice ranging from requirements analysis through deployment.

Desirable Experience

* Experience programming in Q or K (Kdb+), APL, Sybase IQ, Vhayu, Fame, or Vertica
* Experience In-memory database programming languages
* Financial qualifications such as CSC and/or CFA

None Available
If you are looking for an exciting opportunity and to build a career in an innovative and dynamic investment organization, submit your resume by clicking on Apply Now below.
Apply to this job
We thank all applicants for their interest, however only candidates selected for an interview will be contacted. CPP Investment Board is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

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Craig Murphy, author, blogger, community evangelist, developer and speaker revisited a programming assignment from his student days learning Pascal, and invited readers to show how they would program it these days.

The problem was array-like and APLers crawled all over it. You have to wonder what Murphy's regular readers made of it all.

Here's the parallel discussion on comp.lang.apl.