Dyalog announces 2010 programming competition

Following on from last years successful contest, the 2010 edition of the Dyalog Programming Contest was launched last week.

The contest has been established with the purpose of encouraging students, and others, to investigate APL.

Last year, we estimate that roughly 300 students downloaded an educational copy of Dyalog APL as a result of hearing about the contest. A young man named Ronald Chan won USD 2,000 plus an all-expenses paid trip from New Zealand to Princeton, New Jersey for our annual conference. 35 other participants won cash prizes, including people who did not submit programs but introduced the people who did.

You can read about the results of last year's contest at:

http://www.dyalog.com/news.htm#contest

... and watch a few minutes of the prize ceremony at:

http://video.dyalog.com/Dyalog09/2009ProgrammingContestPrizeCeremony.html

This year, the contest is sponsored by Fiserv (US), Simcorp (Denmark), APL Italiana (Italy) and Dyalog Ltd. as well as several individuals and companies who have chosen to remain anonymous. There are 26 cash prizes to be won by students with an equivalent number of introduction awards - totalling US$ 15,000 (up from 11,000 last year).

The First Prize winner can look forward to $2,500 plus round trip travel from anywhere in the world to the APL 2010 Conference in Berlin Germany on September 13-16.

As before, the people or organisations that introduce the winning students to the contest will receive the same dollar prizes - and they need not be students to make the introduction.

The deadline for submission is Noon UTC, July 18th, 2010.

For more information on the programming contest, rules and submission of entries, see http://www.dyalog.com/contest_2010, and/or join the Facebook group "Dyalog Programming Contest".

We hope that you will support the contest this year, either by participating (if you should be lucky enough to qualify) or by passing this information on to a student who might be interested!

Morten Kromberg,
CTO, Dyalog Ltd.

2009 Worldwide Programming Contest winners announced

Dyalog has announced the winners of the 2009 Worldwide Programming Contest.

First prize went to Ronald Chan. The judges commented:

Ronald’s submission showed impressive insight and analysis of the problems and the underlying mathematics, good use of classes. His submission ran considerably faster than any other entry. Ronald documented his solutions very well and many of his solutions were of a form to solve more general problems than the specific Project Euler problem presented. His efforts included error checking to capture invalid inputs.

Second place went to Chris King:

What set Chris’ entry apart was the brevity and compactness of his solutions. He made extensive use of operators, reduction, composition, power and limit. A good example of APL as a tool of thought.

Third place was taken by Maks Verver:

Maks had a commendable entry with good documentation, good use of APL, and good insight into the problems presented.

Vector congratulates the winners and looks forward to seeing Ronald in Princeton next month.

APL article on Wikipedia

At yesterday's meeting, BAA London drafted a new opening for the Wikipedia article on APL, and posted it on the APL Wiki for further work (especially collecting citations) before it goes on Wikipedia.

Take a look at the draft and see what you can contribute.

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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.

Catherine Lathwell's APL Diaries

Catherine Lathwell has announced her documentary film project. The project blog is at www.aprogramminglanguage.com