Welcome to DYALOGue
Considering we didn't have a new release of Dyalog APL out in 2010, which usually takes up a 'bit of time', the year never the less just seemed to skip by. We have been very busy indeed. As 2011 is now moving close to spring I am delighted to give you a round-up of all the news and initiatives Dyalog is currently involved with.
As I write this column, Dyalog APL V 13.0 is in Beta test and we're in the process of planning the commercial release which will happen very shortly. As usual, it will be available in 32- and 64-bit versions under Microsoft Windows, AIX and Linux (and for Solaris "on demand"). V13.0 will be break significant new ground on a number of fronts. Read all about it here.
While the production of new releases of Dyalog APL still consumes most of our efforts, those of you who visited the successful APL2010 conference in Berlin in September will be aware that we have a number of other irons in the fire. The two most important ones are APL# and The Remote Integrated Development Environment – RIDE.
Dyalog continues to grow and this means we have new additions to the team. We have recruited more developers and our good fortune in finding excellent developers has continued! Jay Foad joined the team in May and is now working on the core interpreter. You can read more about Jay in a previous issue of DYALOGue. Liam Flanagan came on board in September and immediately we shipped him over to attend the APL 2010 conference in Berlin. Liam is working on .NET, GUI and other interfaces. See more about Liam later in this newsletter. Kristoffer Kromberg joined us 1st December as an APL Programmer apprentice. Meet Kristoffer later in this newsletter too.
2011 was, therefore, off to a perfect start especially as we now provide a little balance to the newcomers by welcoming an array language legend into the team: Roger Hui has been helping us with performance enhancements for some years; we are incredibly pleased and proud that Roger will be working for Dyalog in an almost full time capacity from January – with a little of his time fenced off to continue his work as the chief architect and implementer of the J programming language! See more about Roger and his work with Dyalog later in this newsletter.
In addition to new employees, we have been very happy to collaborate with a growing number of external APL consultants who have helped us develop and test code in 2010. Peter-Michael Hager has been applying his combined APL and cryptographic skills to help us design a comprehensive "Cryptographic Library" for APL, which will provide cross-platform access to fast algorithms for hashing, symmetric and asymmetric encryption using a variety of algorithms. We would also like to thank Kai Jäger, Michael Hughes and Brian Becker, several of whom also presented recent work that they have done in collaboration with Dyalog on tools for Dyalog APL, at APL2010.
But one cannot rest on the laurels. We're busy planning Dyalog '11 which will take place in Boston October 2-5 (both days inclusive. Read more about the conference plans and the venue later in this newsletter.
The Dyalog Programming Competition 2011 is currently under development and will be announced a bit later in the spring. Keep an eye on our website, where we will announce the launch of this year's competition.
A propos Programming Competition. Ronald Chan, the first winner of the Dyalog Programming Competition back in 2009, has been braving the (record) English winter in order to be an intern at Dyalog during his New Zealand summer holidays. Ronald has been with us from the middle of November to the end of February of 2011. Ronald is a wonderful mathematician and C coder; in his first month at Dyalog he re-implemented matrix inverse and the beta/gamma distribution functions for all our numeric types, resulting in faster and more precise results all round(!). Over Christmas, Ronald has been playing with a model of an interface to the R programming language. We were sorry to see him return to University to attack a PhD at the end of February, our consolation is that he will continue to work for us part-time (a PhD isn't that much work, after all)!
Outside of that we have firm plans to accelerate the development of tools and interfaces written in APL. It is our ambition, over the next few years, to augment the enhancements that we have been putting into the interpreter with a comprehensive set of application development tools for APL developers and to work hard on sharing these with the APL community on our own web page, on the APL Wiki and other online forums.
That reminds me; Keep an eye on the Dyalog web page in 2011! If you have not already done so, subscribe to the new Dyalog forums (http://www.dyalog.com/forum/) – you do not need to be a user of Dyalog APL to do so. The Forums are getting livelier all the time and have become our primary channel for formal and informal announcements including FAQs. In 2011, we also expect to make increasing use of our Twitter and Facebook feeds as distribution channels for news.
So, once again, welcome to another busy year with Dyalog.
Enjoy your reading
Gitte Christensen