World Wide Computer Programming Contest

Dyalog has announced $11,000 of prizes to be won in a world-wide computer programming contest.

Interview with Arthur Whitney

ACM's Queue magazine carries an inspiring, laugh-out-loud interview with KX Systems founder Arthur Whitney.

Among other gems, the king of fast, reliable, mission-critical systems advocates editing code to maximise beauty, and tossing and rewriting as often as one can.

Iversonians on Facebook

Early in 2008 I deactivated my Facebook account for being too annoying. Early this year I reactivated the account to help promote an event I was organising, and was pleased to find it better organised and much more useful.

There is now an Iversonians group on Facebook.

At Play With J

The first edition of At Play With J, collected from Eugene McDonnell’s columns for Vector has been published at Lulu.com.

The first edition reproduces the original Vector articles with only minor amendments. But J has evolved over the many years during which McDonnell wrote his column, and in the latest version of J not all the examples work as given. We expect the first edition to be of largely historical interest.

Volunteer editors are preparing a revised second edition on the J Wiki. Please help them if you can.

APL Bay Area Users' Group meeting 11 May

The APL Bay Area Users' Group (The Northern California SIGAPL of the ACM) will meet at 7 p.m. on Monday the 11th of May at the Computer History Museum.

Catherine Lathwell will speak on her rediscovery of the history of APL.

She witnessed the wild growth of APL in the 1970s as the daughter of Dick Lathwell, who worked with Larry Breed and Roger Moore to turn Iverson notation into APL\360. Now she wonders "What is APL's contribution to science?" and has begun producing a history of APL documentary film as an independent producer with CineFocus Canada.

More information at aprogramminglanguage.wordpress.com.

The talk will be at the Computer History Museum, 1401 North Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, CA 94043

Officers for the APL BUG will be elected at the meeting. Anyone interested in standing for office should contact the chair, Chuck Kennedy.

Those interested in supper before the talk will try the new Pizzeria Venti at 1390 Pear Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94043 650:254-1120. Please RSVP to Curtis Jones if you're planning to come to the restaurant.