Dyalog on the Road
It hardly seems as if 9 months have passed since we met in Glasgow for Dyalog '16, but when we look at the events and user meetings that we have attended since then, time really has flown!
Here's a review of some of the events we have attended since Dyalog '16 last October.
You may remember that Roger and Morten left the venue in Glasgow to attend Functional Conf 2016 in Bangalore, India. Here Morten presented Notation for Parallel Thought; Roger presented A Tour (de Force) of APL in 16 Expressions. Together they hosted a workshop on Array Oriented Functional Programming with Dyalog, and Morten was interviewed for Flaw Code, a podcast on Functional Programming.
November 2016 saw the return of FinnAPL in Helsinki, Finland. Dyalog's CTO, Jay, presented Dyalog News and Exact Integers at this user meeting. Gitte and Morten attended the APL BUG meeting at the Computer History Museum in California, U.S.A., where they spoke about 50 Years of APL and the Second 50 years of APL respectively. On the subject of 50 years of APL, visit our celebration page to see all the information, posters, old images and much more that we have collected for our virtual museum. If you have anything from the past 50 years that you think might fit into the collection, please send it to us for inclusion.
Also in November, Morten presented Futures and Isolates: Novel Constructs for Parallel and Asynchronous Programming to the Computer Science department at Portland State University in Oregon, U.S.A.. APL Germany held a user meeting in Böblingen dedicated to the celebration of 50 years of APL and we managed to make a champagne toast to APL at exactly 50 years after the saving of the first cleanspace. Dyalog's John Scholes presented The Evolution of Dyalog APL and Morten presented APL – the second half century.
We started 2017 with another APL Germany meeting, this time in Mannheim. There, Richard presented Text Files and Plain-Text Serialisation, Michael talked about Living with Dyalog and Gitte gave the News from Dyalog. Next came the FinnAPL meeting at Fiskars Village in south-west Finland, where Gitte spoke about News from Dyalog while Morten presented Cross platform HTML UI without a web server. In April there was a SwedAPL meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, where the theme was cross platform APL, with a number of interesting presentations on techniques that are being used to run APL services on a variety of platforms; Morten presented the cross platform HTML user interface tools that will be included with Dyalog version 16.0.
In May it was time to leave the familiarity of APL community events for LambdaConf 2017 in Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.. Here Aaron Hsu presented his workshop The Functional Array Funhouse Intensive. Aaron explains: "In presenting my research to non-APL programmers, I have observed three major, fundamental difficulties that computer scientists have with array programming: idiomatic thinking, notational reasoning and direct development. Most uninitiated have most of their exposure to APL from the flashy, sometimes expert level one-liners, which they must process through their own understanding and expectations of computing. This often leaves them in awe, but not engaged. From there it is easy for them to see the basics of how APL works at a semantic level, but they usually fail to make the leap from that into practical competency with the language, through a combination of misunderstanding and counter-intuitive computing doctrines. In the workshop we focused on addressing this gap, by giving programmers a chance to go beyond the basic syntax and semantics and understand the human factors involved with the APL notation. How to actually achieve the 'mystical' one-liner efficiency in real, practical code, and how to integrate this experience-driven development methodology into the real needs of every day programming. Naturally, fun and enjoyment from the programming effort is a large part of this." Morten was present in Boulder as Aaron's assistant, helping as a couple of dozen functional programmers with various backgrounds learned some APL; he thinks Aaron's approach worked quite well and looks forward to more of these events!
As spring turns to summer we are preparing for the next Dyalog user meeting – Dyalog '17 will be held September 10-14 in Elsinore, Denmark. We are also planning our strongest ever presence at Functional Conf 2017 in Bangalore, India in November, when Aaron will re-run his Array FunHouse Intensive workshop, Roger will present a talk on Proofs, Derivations and Tests, and Morten will team up with Dhaval Dalal for some Code Jugalbandi, comparing functional and array oriented solutions in a live coding session.
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