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.
