Dyalog around the World – a whirlwind spring
by Morten Kromberg, CXO
Phew – the number of stops on the international APL circuit just keeps growing!
A year ago, I was really pleased to report that SWEDAPL had started holding regular APL user meetings after a lengthy break. Since then, SWEDAPL has burst on to the stage as one of the youngest, most vibrant APL communities out there, attracting international visitors to meetings first in Malmö and then – in the spirit of major bicycle races – a stage in a different country when SimCorp hosted a meeting in Copenhagen on Concurrency in APL on April 1st. Recordings of the presentations from this meeting can be found at http://www.data-analytics.se/swedapl-2016-copenhagen-roundup/.
It was a joy to be at the BAA Annual General Meeting on June 6th. This was the best attended meeting that I can remember, with a great collection of talks, including presentations by Dyalog's Richard Smith on Cross-platform File Functions in Dyalog v15.0 and Roger Hui on ideas for a Memo Operator. The BAA is using the same GoToMeeting technology as SWEDAPL, to stream the meetings in real time and subsequently make the talks available. You can read about – and view the recordings from – the BAA AGM at http://www.britishaplassociation.co.uk/report-baa-2016/. The BAA continues to hold monthly meetings, all of which accept remote participants.
This year, the new country on the circuit is France; we held our first Dyalog User Meeting in recent times in Paris on March 14th. It was wonderful to see many old friends – and even more exciting to meet some young French people who were completely new to APL. You can read a blog entry about this meeting at http://www.dyalog.com/blog/2016/03/rencontres-dyalog-apl-2016-paris-france/.
Not everything is new: in accordance with tradition, we started the Spring User Meeting Circuit in Finland the week before Paris, and ended in Germany in May. The FinnAPL Forest Seminar is a classic which has been held every spring for a long time. As usual, this was a lot of fun, and the subject of a Dyalog blog, which you can find at http://www.dyalog.com/blog/2016/03/finnapl-forest-seminar-2016/. APL Germany met on the banks of the Rhine this spring, at the 'Fachhochschule' in Bingen on the Rhine, where we enjoyed intriguing presentations on driving virtual race cars, implementing web servers and -services, XML and PMML in APL, and why block chains are important, washed down with some truly excellent beer! We tweeted using the tag #gseapl16.
Last year we had our first Dyalog North America User Meeting (DYNA15). This year, DYNA16 was held in Princeton again – on April 18th & 19th – the first time that the new CTO/CXO duo shared to podium to present the Dyalog Road Map.
The ARRAY'16-mobile with bicycle: A house on wheels was much cheaper than Santa Barbara hotels, and made it possible to do some wonderful rides up Pacific coast canyons, too. Pictured near Ojai, CA.
I had the pleasure of returning to the USA in June, as an invited keynote speaker at the Array workshop (http://conf.researchr.org/track/pldi-2016/ARRAY-2016) at the 37th annual ACM conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) in Santa Barbara, California. I managed to record this talk, which you can find on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb4McHiU5ck). As at ARRAY'15 last year, there were other talks about APL, with two teams reporting on APL compiler work: Aaron Hsu from Indiana University and the HiperFit team from the University of Copenhagen, who report that they are making good progress on compiling APL into a language called Futhark, targeting GPUs. Read more about it at https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2016-06-20-futhark-as-an-apl-compiler-target.html.
Make sure to come to Dyalog '16 in Glasgow October 9-13th this year, we expect both compiler teams to be reporting on further progress.
For the third year in a row, Dyalog is attending FunctionalConf in India. Last year Jay Foad and I held a workshop on Dyalog APL, this year Roger Hui will accompany me to Bangalore where we will both do a talk to a couple of hundred functional programmers.
The number of APL meetings is reaching the point where we sometimes struggle to attend them all, but please do send us an invitation if you are considering hosting a meeting on APL – we rarely say no!
After the summer, we are planning to further increase our outreach by hosting regular webcasts from our offices around the world using Jason's new recording kit. We look forward to meeting you in person – or online – in the near future!