Hello! Further to Morten’s kind words of introduction, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself as the new CTO of Dyalog Ltd.
About me
I’m a newcomer to APL. When I started working for Dyalog in 2010 I had only seen the Game of Life video, an intriguing but baffling glimpse into a world of squiggles. But I soon got the opportunity to learn from some giants of the language, and came to appreciate the power and beauty of the notation. Later I learned that, despite its venerable history, the language is not set in stone; with care and attention we can develop and extend it to increase its power, relevance and performance, without sacrificing its elegance and simplicity.
We — not just Dyalog, but the wider APL community — are guardians of a rare thing: a language born more than 50 years ago that is not just relevant and useful today, but groundbreaking in the way it embodies data parallelism from the ground up in a simple, consistent notation.
Before working at Dyalog I spent 13 years developing compilers, optimisers and debuggers for more mainstream programming languages, including C and Java. This has given me a good insight into how to get the best performance out of modern computer hardware, and I’ve made it my continuing mission to help bring that level of performance to APL!
My rôle
As CTO I’ll be responsible for day-to-day management of the core interpreter development team, and for the overall technical strategy of the company. This strategy must include getting the maximum performance out of current and future hardware, but also:
- Keeping the quality of the product as high as possible.
- Embracing new platforms and attracting new users.
- Improving our development tools, and making it easier to create and deploy new applications.
- Ensuring that Dyalog APL can interoperate smoothly with modern frameworks and services.
- Continuing to look at new ways of (carefully!) extending and improving the core APL language.
I’m looking forward to working on this alongside the “new” CXO, Morten. At Dyalog we take a lot of care in the design of new features, and I firmly believe that a lively discussion between CXO (representing the needs of the customer) and CTO (representing the language designers and implementers) will only improve the quality of the designs we come up with.
On the road
In the future I expect to spend a bit more time out and about, showing off Dyalog APL, and talking to all of you about your own needs and expectations of the product. In particular, this year I’ll be at DYNA16 in Princeton in April, and the Dyalog ’16 User Meeting in Glasgow in October. I look forward to seeing, or meeting, all of you soon!
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All the Very Best Jay in your new role.