Friday 19 June 2009

Functional programming in J

In the third instalment of his series, Neville Holmes introduces us to the structural ingredients

Thursday 18 June 2009

How language shapes thought


Professor Lera Boroditsky at Stanford has dragged the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis back into the laboratory. Her work discovers the ways in which thought depends on the languages we use. Iverson, rest easy; programmers, take note.

Article: "How does our language shape the way we think?"

APLX 5ß out now

MicroAPL has released APLX 5 for public ß-testing, with the new XML interface and inbuilt performance profiling.

Dyalog 12.1ß out now

Dyalog 12.1, with the new XL interface, is now out for ß-testing.

Wednesday 17 June 2009

Stuck On You: APL, K & J - BAPLA2009

I'm sitting here back home in Toronto and it's raining and cold outside, just like last week in the UK. :) And I'm thinking about how well things just work out sometimes.

Never mind that APL still sports a strong community of eccentric, smart, thoughtful people and I was lucky to spend a couple of days surrounded by the clan. That's cool. Really cool. It feels like falling in love again with a long lost friend. Great. But forget about all of that.

The conference set the context for my project, my film, the movie, our movie - firmly in the now.

Because the conference was successful in its goal, to demonstrate array languages in the real world, I am now set to go. I have a decent overview of how the community has adapted our APL family of languages to radical changes in the computing world. Neat.

The programmer in me can appreciate the power of opening doors via XML & R interfaces. This tempts the Interactive Artist in me to say, give me the numbers, I'll make them dance in in Flash with ActionScript. But that's for later, for now I focus on the task at hand - the film.

In "APL in the New Millennium" Ken Iverson wrote that the differences in the APL community should be put aside. He wrote, we should be emphasizing the strengths and similarities between the different version of APL in order to present a unified face to the outside world. I think this is true. That we do have to do this. We are accumulating critical mass as slowly technology changes in our favour. Clearly, we all benefit from this critical mass and its associated momentum.

And just as clearly, computational power and data storage are no longer the expensive part of software development, labour is now a weighty expense. So, faster development is cheaper development. Go team, go! If I didn't love making this film so much, I'd be jumping right back in there with you. What a fun time! (And silly me!)

And the tension point, of course, is that clearly not all the APLs and APL derivative languages will survive forever. How do we compete in a competative market and co-operate at the same time?

Legally, of course, I mean.

Happy me - I get to watch from the sidelines.

But for now, I think the time for APL, J & K to really shine is here and that perhaps these old founding folks were smarter than they thought.

And they thought themselves mighty smart.

Monday 15 June 2009

Life, the Universe and everything else at BAPLA09

It seems like a long time ago but the BAPLA09 conference is now well and truly behind us, the APLers have gone home and it just remains for us to report back to those who couldn't attend what we did and what happens next.

We saw some new members enter the APL community and from Europe, USA and UK some 49 people rallied to the call and hoisted the banner high. The conference was brisk and covered a lot of ground in just two days - 20 presentations, 1 AGM, 1 guest speaker and a band; I hope we didn't cram too much in. Nevertheless the assembled crowd still managed to find time to solve all of the worlds' problems either in the coffee lounge or, more than likely, the bar.

For those of you who could not attend the conference we plan to publish the presentations shortly as we managed to record the sound together with a screen capture for most of them. Details will follow soon.

The food was great, the company even better and the environment in the hotel very comfortable. Tea and coffee flowed throughout the day and some members of the party were even seen jogging around the grounds on occasion. I would have joined them but was just too busy (yeah right).

We had 20 or so presentations with most running between 30 and 45 minutes so the pace was brisk having time for only 10 minutes or so between talks. During our initial scheduling we had only planned for 7 presentations per day thereby giving much more time between for 'APLchat'. The demand from speakers took us rather by surprise so it was increased to 10 per day but even then we could not accommodate everyone!

Day 1 tried to be technically biased with Day 2 more application development - not sure if we quite managed to achieve that but if you close one eye and squint ... We covered topics from nursery school education through to universal string theory, and where application development is heading through to 138 Billion record databases (give or take a couple). Then just to be different our last formal speaker, Catherine Lathwell, showed us one film she had made and discussed another that she was planning - on APL. I hope that everyone found something to interest them.

It was a slight shame that the UK companies we had hoped would attend essentially didn't. This was not because they were not interested (which I guess is a good thing) but because of the current financial situation and budgets being so tight. The messages coming back was the same from all so maybe next time!

As has become the norm in APL conferences we had a banquet with music and a speaker at the end of Day 1. Our band 'The Casablanca Steps' were very entertaining and went down well. have a look on youtube - its much easier for you to take a look than for me to try and describe. Our speaker for the night was Johnny Ball who is a well known TV personality here in the UK. He gave us a passionate and entertaining after dinner speech on topics covering education, mathematics and the environment - and that certainly led to some discussion afterward!


Overall we had an excellent two days and I certainly felt it was worth the effort of organising it. So what happens in 2010? Well I for one have not yet recovered from 2009 but if we can generate the interest, come up with some new ideas, and get some evening seminars going who knows ... Let me know what you think and what you want.



Paul Grosvenor
(Chairman BAA)

Sunday 14 June 2009

“Program in APL” article in PC Plus magazine

PC Plus July 2009, p283

The July issue of PC Plus magazine includes a 3-page article “Program in APL”, featuring the NARS2000 interpreter.

Saturday 13 June 2009

Countdown to the Worldwide Programming Contest

Now less thab three weeks before Dyalog’s Worldwide Programming Contest closes. Student entries will win $5,500 in prizes; others can earn as much introducing them to APL. And the winner gets travel to Dyalog09 from anywhere in the world.

We’ve started a countdown on the Vector front page.

Friday 5 June 2009

Catherine Lathwell Rediscovers the History of APL

Most of you have probably figured out that my name is Catherine Lathwell and I have begun working on a documentary film about the History of APL.

Last month, on May 11, 2009, I spoke publicly for the first time about this film with the APL Bay Area Users' Group meeting at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. I live in Toronto and had booked a trip to Palo Alto to touch base with some of the old timer APL folks as an informal kick-off trip for the film. Curtis Jones found out about these plans because I plastered them all over cyberspace and organised the meeting as well as a personal tour of the museum by Dr. Leonard Shustek, Chairman of the Board for the Museum.

The Museum is awesome. At the time, a fully functioning Babbage Engine had taken up residence is the foyer. It's beautiful. Later, I got goose bumps in the lab where they are re-conditioning old machines. The lab feels like one those old machine rooms, only smaller. They had card readers (oh, my) and those old machine room printers - I can't even remember what they are called. I do however, clearly remember Charlotte Dawson giving me what-for about not tying my hair back when I was setting them up. Charlotte was my (s)hero and boss :) so, the hair went up.

Back at the Museum they are in the midst of a massive fund raising campaign to support an ambitious exhibit featuring a time line of computer history. And incidentally, as far as I can tell, we haven't made it onto the time line in software languages category on the museum's web site, so there is an opportunity for advocacy here. In any case, a problem they will have with their exhibition, and a problem I will also share is, how do you explain something abstract, like a computer language to a general audience?

The meeting with the APL Bay Area Users' Group went much as one might expect. I introduced myself and talked about my ideas for the film. I then showed a short video interview with my father, and this stimulated discussion about the good old days. Discussion was lively and folks have a lot to say. The group supports the film idea and everyone is eager to help out. This is great.

I'm now getting ready to fly to the UK tonight so that I can talk about the film at the BAPLA2009 conference. This is very exciting and fun. I have a lot of energy for this project because I truly believe it is important - and if not now, When? And if not me, Who?

I'm looking forward to seeing you all on Monday. Keep watching this space...

http://www.computerhistory.org/
http://www.aprogramminglanguage.com/

Wednesday 3 June 2009

BAA London meeting 26 June

Next meeting will be at:

The Knights Templar
95 Chancery Lane
Holborn
London
WC2A 1DT
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=WC2A%201DT

On 26 June. 2pm downstairs for 2.30pm up.

We have a room booked from 14.30 'til 17.00 away from all the noise
and bustle and overlooking Carey Street