APL Seeds '23

As a general purpose programming language, the question "what is APL good for?" doesn't have a single concise answer – its terse syntax and highly-composable primitives make it ideal for exploratory programming in a wide range of domains. Rich covers one possibility as he introduces APL using a problem with an elegant solution highly suited to APL's array processing capabilities.

Keywords: data processing, outer product, array thinking

Mnemonics (techniques for remembering) will assist you in learning the meaning of APL glyphs and where to find them on your keyboard. Both of these skills are essential for an effective APL programmer. Adám illustrates some examples that you'll never forget, and shows you where to find more.

Keywords: aide-mémoire, studying, typing, glyphs

Code golfing (that is, trying to write expressions using the fewest possible number of characters) a line of APL is fun, but what if you want to get real-world tasks done with this language? Josh takes a look at some of the more practical tooling that Dyalog has built on top of the core language, especially ways to ingest data from difference sources. He also explores what a full-stack commercial APL application can look like.

Keywords: data import/export, file storage, databases, GUI

25 years ago, Richard discovered some strange glyphs and thought that there must be a good reason why people were using such a strange-looking programming language. A year ago he finally decided to investigate further, and his investigations have taken him somewhere completely different to his expectations. Instead of just learning a programming language, he has found that APL has taught him to think in different ways and to return to the fundamentals of the problems that need to be solved. He discovered how rewarding it is when you start to understand the concept, and that there's an active and enthusiastic community who can assist when you have questions and challenge you to do even better.

Richard tells the story of how he ended up using APL and why, even as a non-IT person, it is helping him in his daily job.

Stefan shows how you can do "boring stuff" in APL, the sort of stuff you might not think it's suitable for, such as talking to web services and dealing with JSON data. He'll demonstrate the user commands that fetch data from an HTTP API to enable easy further processing inside an APL session.