Josh David is a recent graduate from the University of Scranton with a degree in Computer Science. He minored in Philosophy at college and headed The Philosophy Society, so feel free to strike up a philosophical discussion with him at any time!

He is no stranger to APL. In Scranton, he was introduced to APL during an internship with The Carlisle Group. From there, he continued learning and developing in APL and was one of the three grand prize winners in the 2016 APL problem solving competition. Throughout his college career he sporadically worked on other APL projects. He has done frequent pair programming with Stephen Mansour, who was conveniently teaching statistics at the same university! His interest is in Computer Science, and he has also done non-APL related software development at his University and professionally during another internship with MetLife.

He will primarily be a contractor for North American clients. Some of his time will also be spent with Dyalog’s Tools group, developing tools to make APL programming easier, more powerful, and current with new technologies.

One particular area he wants to tackle is creating more libraries and interfaces in APL. With the recent push towards git and source code in text files among the Dyalog APL community, he believes that now is a prime time to do this.

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Based in Denver, Colorado, Nathan Rogers is a new member of the Dyalog team. In previous lives, Nathan spent six years as a member of the United States Armed Services as a Satellite Communications Operator, studied music theory and performance at the University of Northern Colorado, and built desktop and web applications across numerous languages and frameworks in a variety of domains.

Nathan first came into contact with APL when discussing code obfuscation with other programmers, and a coworker mentioned K and APL. APL became an immediate obsession, and Nathan became a regular in the Stack Exchange chat room “The APL Orchard”. He quickly began spending all of his free time learning APL, building familiar applications and tools using this quirky language, and reading about its fascinating history. He finds it funny in hindsight that he was introduced to the language in a conversation about code obfuscation, only to now be an APL evangelist, believing the concepts of APL to be as fundamental to elevating the world of computer programming as the Arabic numerals were to the study of Mathematics. After a year or so, Nathan was put in touch with Morten Kromberg at Dyalog. The two began pair-programming projects, which quickly proved fruitful and led to Nathan joining the team soon after.

When Nathan isn’t working on consulting projects, or tools for Dyalog, you can typically find him behind his keyboard building his own tools and toy functions in APL, with two aims in mind: convert as many traditional programmers as possible to APL, and bring his knowledge and experience to bear on modernizing APL and its tools for the current and next generation of new programmers.

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Richard Park is the latest addition to the Dyalog team and is based at Dyalog HQ in the UK. Richard has been living in the same house in Bramley his entire life and recently returned to the village after one successful degree in physics at the University of Manchester, and one unsuccessful degree in education at Manchester Metropolitan University.

How Richard and Dyalog came to meet is a story that deserves to be told, albeit a bit embarrassing for poor Richard!

One day, while walking his dog and father, Richard rang the office doorbell to inquire about any software-related opportunities that might be available. He had developed an interest in computers from using them at young age, building circuits for A-level electronics and learning about the physics of computers (as well as computational physics) at University. If only Richard had been able to convey any of that to Jay Foad, who answered the door, instead of standing like a “gormless idiot” (his words) whilst his father jumped in and asked about internships and job opportunities…

Richard went home that evening and browsed the Dyalog website… the Pandora’s box of APL edged ajar and he began to imbibe the symbols. He also sent an amusing email explaining the earlier awkward encounter and clearly showing that he was not a “gormless idiot”. This resulted in a meeting with the CEO and CXO, Gitte and Morten, in October 2018. After that meeting Richard showed enough aptitude and interest, while pair-programming a simplistic physics simulation with Morten, that they decided to keep him.

Given that Richard’s previous experience includes programming an autonomous robot for the QMC team in the 2012 and 2013 Student Robotics competitions and using MATLAB and CERN’s ROOT library to process experimental data and run simulations, he was very surprised that he had never heard of APL before. He sees a potential in APL to develop domain specific programming languages and software packages to help teachers convey concepts in a way which more closely matches the syntax and jargon in which problems are already described.

In his new role at Dyalog, Richard is developing teaching materials and demos to promote APL.

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