Welcome to the Spring Issue of DYALOGue
Time flies – In April 2015 it was 10 years since Morten and I joined Dyalog, with a goal of securing a future for Dyalog and APL.
I believe we have done quite well. We have grown very significantly: the five people who were responsible for Dyalog APL before the acquisition in 2005 have now become more than twenty – and we have plans to hire a couple more this year.
The development of the APL language, the tools and platforms, opening up Dyalog APL for applications developed using object oriented programming including full integration with the Microsoft.NET platform, SALT, Conga, RIDE, MiServer, WPF, cross platform files, Futures and isolates, increased performance and speed in executing applications...the list of things that Dyalog has delivered is very long, and today Dyalog APL is a modern efficient development environment. I salute the Dyalog team, they can rightfully be proud of what has been achieved so far.
Having said that, the time has also come to start preparing the company for the next step. The result of these considerations is that we have appointed Jay Foad as the new CTO of Dyalog with immediate effect.
This frees up Morten for the role of Chief Experience Officer (CXO), which will allow us to have a more intense focus on customers and how we can make the company more adept in going after completely new business – and not least attracting and bringing up a new generation of APL users and top guns. Not that I envisage Dyalog ever becoming a massively sales driven organisation, but we want to do more to bring that language out of the quiet corner it has inhabited for the last couple of decades and to re-launch Dyalog APL as the agile, suitable 'language of choice' for development of new modern applications it is – be it on Desktops, Tablets, Smartphones, Apple gadgets, or cloud hosted.
2015 saw our first DYNA (Dyalog North America) event in Princeton NJ, which was a great success. We have just finalised the programme for DYNA16 – which will again take place in Princeton, April 18th-19th April.
As I have now struck the chord of user meetings, I'm very pleased to see that we're getting an increasing number of local Dyalog user meetings – this year will see the first one in France. Dyalog experts, and Morten and I will, of course, attend all of them.
Last year, I was invited to speak about APL at a conference on the history of IT in the Nordic Countries. Since I only discovered APL in 1983, I spent some interesting time with good friends from Denmark, Sweden and Finland learning about the early days in order to be able to give a good overview of the usage of APL.
In 2016 we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the )SAVE of the first CLEANSPACE – the birthdate of APL as an interactive tool. If you have a good story from the first 50 years, in which APL helped you to a breakthrough in a scientific or business field, or allowed you to quickly implement a solution to a particularly tricky problem, please write to us. We are planning to set time aside at Dyalog '16 (to be held in Glasgow, Scotland on October 9th-13th), to celebrate 50 years of APL as a Tool of Thought – with a series of historical presentations. In addition, we will collect the stories on the internet for you to enjoy during the next 50 years.
Check the conference web page regularly for more details of the programme for the annual global user meeting as it becomes available, and a link to the registration system when it goes live.
Development of the problems to be solved in the 2016 Programming Contest for students is also in process. Again this year the contest will be run in collaboration with SQORE and we expect to kick it off around April 1.
While we are on the subject of students, we also have an interview with Michel Godron on how he, together with scientists and students from 5 universities, is using Dyalog APL to create statistical tools to study the geographical distribution of vegetation species in northern tropical Africa.
This issue of DYALOGue also carries an article by Gianfranco Alongi from Ericsson AB in Sweden on why collaborative programming with a high degree of human communication is the way forward for software development.
Enjoy your reading!
Gitte Christensen