Dyalog on the Road
It is really encouraging to note that, after some relatively quiet years, the number of opportunities to talk to people about APL in general and Dyalog in particular is definitely on the rise!
International APL User Groups
For as long as I can remember, the Finnish and Germany APL User groups have held a spring and an autumn meeting each year, and these have become fix-points in our calendars: Dyalog is always represented by 1 to 3 people at these events. Recently, we have seen a couple of other APL groups resume regular meetings: The British APL group now holds monthly get-togethers in London, and has recently started live-streaming them as well. Also making a comeback is the Swedish APL group (SWEDAPL), which had been dormant for some years. SWEDAPL is now also hosting two meetings a year, alternating between Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmφ. There is a rumour of an APL meeting in Paris later this year (please let us know if you would like to be invited!). You can keep an eye on the list of upcoming events that Dyalog is aware of on Dates for Your Diary. We also maintain a list of User Groups on the Dyalog website (please contact us if the list needs to be corrected or extended)! We note that our cousins the J and K users also hold regular meetings. We do our best to attend these meetings from time to time.
Dyalog User Meetings
Historically, Dyalog has held one 4-5 day user meeting each year, switching between Europe and North America in alternate years. This April, we held the inaugural Dyalog North America (DYNA) meeting in Princeton, with just under 50 participants . You can read our account of our spring trek on the Dyalog blog. Based on feedback from this event, we have decided to bring a few more people over from Europe next year, and switch to holding a 2-3 day DYNA in April in the USA, and the 4-5 day international user meeting in Europe in September – every year - from now on.
Non-APL Events
It is no secret that our ambition is to catch another wave of new APL users soon, and we've started work on getting the word out to the next generation of potential APLers. Last year, I was invited to talk about Dyalog as a 'pragmatic' functional language at Functional Conf '14 in Bangalore, India. This talk resulted in invitations to repeat it in Africa (Cape Town) and North America (San Francisco), with the latter resulting in another invitation to come and talk about APL on Talks@Google in June of this year.
On my way to the Google talk, I had the pleasure of attending the Array '15 Workshop on Libraries, Language and Compilers for Array Programming in Portland, Oregon. Three of the ten accepted papers at this event had APL as the underlying theme – and APL also figured prominently in the opening keynote. APL seems ripe for re-discovery by people who want to put parallel hardware at the fingertips of domain experts!
This September, John Scholes and I have been invited back to FuConf '15 to do a full day workshop on APL – and will probably do a talk in the main conference as well. The timing is a little unfortunate, as we will need to miss the last day of the Dyalog user meeting on Sicily in order to do this. However, we're hoping that the delegates will forgive us for dropping a day of preaching to the converted, and head off to meet some heathens!
Back at home base, Jason is in the process of finding a way to beef up TryAPL.org, which has started to suffer from regular, unpredictable overload each time some popular mailing list mentions APL.