Dyalog on the Road
As you know, Dyalog is keen to continue to expand the community of Dyalog software programmers and attract new audiences to the power of APL. This includes taking advantage of opportunities to present the work we're doing around the globe throughout the year, and keeping up to speed with developments which can and/or will influence Dyalog APL. Below you will find extracts of some of the conferences we have attended and presentations we have given since autumn 2011. You will also find an overview of up-coming events for the next few months where Dyalog will attend/present.
Recent events:
- John Scholes attended IFIP Working Group 2.8 in Sweden in February 2012 where he spent a week totally immersed in the functional programming paradigm, with FP luminaries such as Simon Peyton-Jones and John Hughes. In fact, as John was one of the few non-professors among the delegates, he wondered whether they might make him stand up to remind him that he didn't have a chair. In the event, everyone was extremely friendly and interested in APL. At a working session, towards the end of the week, a small special-interested group made a start on defining an APL-style array library for the functional language Haskell. As a result of this meeting between the APL and FP communities, some interesting opportunities have arisen. We will come back to those opportunities at a later date when we have more to report.
- Jonathan Manktelow has been deeply submerged in the continued development of APL# – check out his presentation at Dyalog '11. Together with Liam Flanagan, Jonathan attended BUILD in Anaheim California in September 2011 (http://www.buildwindows.com/). BUILD is a new event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows. The purpose of Liam's and Jonathan's visit was to gather as much information about the future of Windows and other Microsoft technologies relevant to Dyalog's current and future software products. As Dyalog APL for Windows is both a Windows application as well as a tool that allows users to create their own Windows applications, keeping well-versed on these technologies is crucial in helping us ensure the quality of both our and our users software.
- John Daintree and John Scholes attended the APL Germany meeting in Stuttgart in November 2011. John D gave a presentation on the RIDE (Remote IDE), and John S presented recent research that Dyalog has been doing into the implementation of Function Trains in Dyalog APL.
- In addition to attending numerous APL conferences and user meetings, Morten Kromberg was recently invited to speak at two general "software engineering" conferences – QCONSF in San Francisco in November 2011 and the Software Passion Summit in Göteborg in March 2012. At QCON, Morten and Joel Hough (the winner of the 2011 APL Programming Contest) co-presented a talk on "Why APL is still Cool” – in the track appropriately titled "New Languages changing your world". According to the QCON web site, a video of this presentation will be available from June 4th. Morten presented a talk with the same title in Gothenburg where he attracted the attention of K Scott Allen who was conducting a series of lightning round interviews for the weekly "Herding Code" podcast, which he produces together with Kevin Dente, Scott Koon, and Jon Galloway. You can hear the interview and see Scott's notes here.
- Gitte Christensen, Morten Kromberg and Brian Becker attended the Forest FinnAPL 2012 Seminar at Sannäs Manor in Porvoo, outside Helsinki, on April 19-20. At the conference, Gitte and Morten presented all the news from Dyalog, including Version 13.1, and Brian give a presentation and ran a workshop on MiServer.
Events coming up:
- The British APL Association (BAPLA) is running the 2012 BAPLA AGM & Moot in Cheshunt, Friday-Sunday, 27-29 April. Andy Shiers and John Daintree will be attending on behalf of Dyalog on Saturday 28th.