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It was a gloriously sunny day in Glasgow today. The Golden Jubilee Hotel overlooks the River Clyde and this was the view at sunrise: The day began with delegate registration, with Karen and Fiona manning the registration desk throughout the … Continue reading
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Welcome to Glasgow and to Dyalog ’16 – this year’s annual Dyalog user meeting, which is taking place at the Golden Jubilee Hotel on the banks of the River Clyde. Whether you are attending in Glasgow or following from afar, … Continue reading
It is really good to see APL events come back to life! In April of 2014, we witnessed the re-birth of SWEDAPL, which had been dormant for some time – but now meets twice a year and is perhaps the most vibrant APL meeting on our circuit, with many young developers developing new products and features in APL. The last SWEDAPL meeting drew a substantial international crowd, including a number of Danes – and the next one, scheduled for April 1st, is making a guest appearance in Copenhagen, hosted by Simcorp A/S – a bit like the Tour de France 🙂
This year we are really happy to be back in France, which has also had a relatively dormant APL community for the last decade or so – at least in terms of holding meetings. In this case we decided to arrange a meeting with the help of our French distributor – Quantys. Although the invitation was to a “Dyalog User Meeting“, about half of the attendees were users of other APL systems than Dyalog APL – with a little luck this meeting will turn out to contain the seeds for a rebirth of an independent French APL group. Fingers crossed!
Everyone please note: If you want to organise a local APL event, and you invite a speaker from Dyalog, we will do everything we can to send one or two delegates to your meeting. The current “circuit” includes Finland, Germany and Sweden twice a year, France and the East Coast USA. We have been known to show up at the Bay Area Users’ Group from time to time, in Toronto, at J and kx meetings – and recently also at FunctionalConf in Bangalore.
After welcoming remarks from Marc Righetti of Quantys, Gitte talked about Dyalog’s commitment to ensure that APL is well-integrated with modern computing platforms and infrastructure, which is always in the throes of another revolution. The current movement towards cloud computing and the need for platform independence is no exception. The good news is that Dyalog is growing to meet the challenge; we expect to add another couple of heads this year and grow the company by another ten percent.
Dan Baronet is a native of Montreal, Canada. As one of our French-speaking team members, he ended up doing most of the heavy lifting, with presentations on the upcoming v15.0 release, and a recap of the recent language enhancements in version 14.0 – in particular, the rank and key operators and function trains. Nicolas Delcros also spoke in French on the subject of his most recent work on integrating the publishing capabilities of Adrian Smith’s NewLeaf tool to SharpPlot, under the name SharpLeaf. I was only allowed to interrupt the flow of French twice, first with a road map presentation and, in the afternoon, a brief introduction to Futures and Isolates.
At the end of an action-packed day, Quantys treated us all to Champagne and snacks – many thanks to Marc for running the show and taking good care of us. A single day was much too short a time to do justice to the last decade of Dyalog achievements – so we will have to be back more regularly!
The view from the Sauna. Some people actually went in!
Finns probably have better reasons to look forward to spring more than most of us: not only does it get much easier to keep that hole in the ice open, it is time for the annual FinnAPL Forest Seminar!
This year, just under 20 of us gathered for two days (Thursday March 10th and Friday March 11th) at Hirvihaara Manor, about an hour north of Helsinki, to update each other on what we have been getting up to recently.
Thursday
After a warm welcome from Jouko Kangasniemi, Chairman of FinnAPL, Veli-Matti Jantunen from Statistics Finland kicked the proceedings off with a talk titled “The long way of an APL2 bigot to Dyalog world”, where he discussed features of recent versions of Dyalog APL, awarding some of them them varying numbers of thumbs up, declaring some to be irrelevant. A few were found to be flawed… We are hoping to talk him into a repeat at Dyalog’16 as this was a valuable and thought-provoking review!
I was on next – with the Spring 2016 version of the Dyalog Road Map. As should be confirmed by the slides, there is not a big change in direction. We are planning to increase headcount by another 10% this year and continue investing in the core interpreter technology, APL compilers, and tools to help you build applications on a growing number of platforms.
Ants on the left. Ray Cannon on the right
After lunch, Ray Cannon showed us how to “Build a better ant brain”, producing wonderful, coloured, animations with ants crawling all over the big screen, using MiServer 3.0 and a bit of JavaScript – running under Dyalog APL on a Raspberry Pi!
My technical keynote in the morning had included a demo of a very early prototype of a Python interface, which will allow APL users to tap in to Python libraries. I was, therefore, very interested in the next presentation by Esa Pursiheimo from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland – which gave us all an introduction to the Python language. There is no question that the Python community has built libraries that could be very useful to APLers (although I cannot say the language itself impressed me much 🙂 ).
The last presentation of the day, titled “Data Driven Documents” (aka “D3”), was also about using libraries written in other programming language to extend APL applications. In this case the language was JavaScript. Jouko Kangasniemi from the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) showed how he is generating JavaScript to call the popular D3 Graphics Library and publish charts that are relevant to Economic planners in Finland. A collection of animated charts created using this technology can be found at http://ek.fi/materiaalipankki/tietografiikka/talous/viikon-graafit/.
Since we were in Finland, the afternoon ended with a visit to a traditional “smoke sauna”, before we all scrubbed up for the banquet.
Cheers! From left to right (more or less): Antero Ranne, Gitte Christensen, Esa Lippu, Miika Rämä, Simo Kilponen, Jouko Kangasniemi, Heikki Viitamäki, Esa Pursiheimo, Olli Paavola, Kaarlo Reipas, Göran Koreneff, Morten Kromberg, Kimmo Kekäläinen, Veli-Matti Jantunen, Timo Korpela, Ray Cannon (Missing: Anssi Seppälä)
Friday
The first talk on Friday morning was perhaps the most interesting from my point of view: Antero Ranne of the Ilmarinen Mutual Pension Insurance Company: Parallel showed how he was able to speed up financial simulations by a factor of approximately 3 on his Intel i7-based laptop, using Futures and Isolates in Dyalog version 14.0. It is really good to see that domain experts wield this tool!
After coffee, Gitte presented the work that she had done to put APL on the map as an invited speaker at a recent conference on the history of information technology in the Nordic region. She also reminded us all that we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first running APL system on November 27 (http://silvermapleweb.com/first-cleanspace/). At Dyalog ’16 on October 9th-13th in Glasgow, Scotland, Dyalog will set time aside to celebrate this anniversary in collaboration with the British APL Association. If you have a good story about ground-breaking work done in APL in the early days, please get in touch and discuss how you might contribute to the celebrations!
Once again, I found myself standing between the audience and lunch – fortunately there are enough juicy language features and interfaces coming in versions 15.0 and 16.0 and I did not have anyone walk out before I was done. I even had time to talk about a workspace that we added several years ago, after discovering that several members of the audience were unaware of it: The “loaddata” workspace, which contains functions to read and write Excel Spreadsheets, CSV files, XML and ODBC data sources. If you have not seen it yet, try loading it and take a look.
After another excellent lunch, Anssi Seppälä of Enease Oy wrapped up the formal part of the programme with a talk on an inverted vectorial database implemented in the J programing language, named JD. JD makes it straightforward to manage large timeseries containing records of power usage and the quality of electricity delivered to consumers, perform analyses and generate visualisations of the data.
Several of us continued discussing programming challenges, while drinking (STRONG!!!) Finnish coffee and eating the wonderful cakes that were provided all day by Hirvihaara Manor, before heading back home after another successful FinnAPL Forest Seminar – we look forward to the 2017 edition!
Gitte and I managed to get about 40 hours at home before boarding the next plane, heading for Paris for the first French Dyalog User Meeting in recent history. More about that coming soon!
Vassar Hackathon Poster
Thanks to our dear friend Dr. Ray Polivka, Dan Baronet and I had the opportunity to travel to Vassar College to participate in their Community Hackathon held on 5-6 February 2016.
“What’s a hackathon?” you ask?
Well, we did too, as we’d never participated in one before. 🙂
According to the Hackathon’s announcement:
“CommunityHack is a way to bridge the gap between Vassar CS Majors and Vassar students in other departments as well as local high school and community college students in order to provide them with the opportunity to explore innovative applications of Computer Science. Dance, music, art, video games? CS can be incorporated into all of that and more!”
Stu
dents from Vassar as well as nearby colleges and high schools were invited to attend. In other words, it was a great opportunity to introduce APL to a new generation. As this was our first Hackathon, we had no idea what to expect. Laura, the Hackathon’s organizer, did a wonderful job organizing the event and making us feel welcome. We were invited to give an hour long presentation and Dyalog was listed as an event sponsor.
The Hackathon was a 24 hour event where students were encouraged to split up into groups and pick a problem to solve. During the course of the event, presentations were made on a variety of subjects including “Autonomous Robots Test Ideas About the Evolution of Brains”, “How to make games quick!”, “Virtual Reality”, and of course “Hacking with APL”. Friday evening started with introductions and ice-breakers. During our introduction, I was able to talk a bit about APL and the presentation we would be making on Saturday. Apparently this generated some interest as a number of students came up to Dan, Ray, Jon McGrew and me to ask about APL. We spent several hours showing them APL, to which they seemed eagerly receptive.
I had the pleasure of working with Grace, a CS sophomore, to implement APL (A Puppy Language) in APL. Her project idea was to write an application for potential puppy owners to use so they could get an idea of the responsibility of owning and caring for a puppy. We worked into the wee hours of the night and wound up implementing a multi-threaded domain-specific-language (DSL) where the “puppy”, running in a separate thread, would react to commands typed into the APL session. Negative actions and ignoring the puppy would cause the the puppy’s happiness points (PHPs) to decrease whereas positive actions would increase PHPs. Grace seemed to really enjoy working with APL and returned to the hackathon twice on Saturday as her schedule permitted to continue work on her project.
Saturday, I was slightly concerned that following a talk on virtual reality, APL might not seem all that “cool”, but my fears were allayed for, as I was waiting before my presentation, several students asked the person at the registration desk specifically about the APL presentation.
The presentation went rather well. Watching the jaw-dropping “Wow!” expressions on the faces of many of the students as we showed the power of APL notation made me reminisce back to the time when I first learned APL and was amazed at what I could do with a computer. It also reminded me how blessed I’ve been to have used APL throughout my career.
Our participation in the Hackathon was a great experience. We were able to show Dyalog to close to 100 students, promote the upcoming APL Problem Solving Competition, and encourage people to download and try Dyalog – we had 18 student downloads over the Hackathon weekend. This may have been our first Hackathon, but I’m certain it won’t be our last.
On a personal note, after Dan and I drove up to Montreal to spend the upcoming week working with the APL Tools Team, I received a very nice email from Grace where she wrote “I just wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to work with me on puppy.dws — it is currently my favorite thing that I have ever made.” and “It was really fun working in APL, and I will definitely check out the Dyalog competition.”
Hyvää päivää (good day)
On the last Thursday of November, I had the privilege to meet with with some members of the Finnish APL community in at the Vatt Institute for Economic Research in downtown Helsinki.
Presenting new Dyalog APL features at FinnAPL
The morning was spent engaged in lively conversation about user interfaces and Dyalog APL. In particular we talked about MiServer – Dyalog’s framework for cross-platform user interface development – and the RIDE (Remote Interactive Development Environment). MiServer can run on any platform where Dyalog APL runs. As such, I was able to demonstrate several examples of web sites running under MiServer on a Raspberry Pi. With RIDE, one can access a Dyalog APL development environment via a TCP/IP connection – the development environment can be on the same machine as RIDE or on another machine, as long as it is listening for a RIDE connection. While Dyalog APL for Windows has always had windowed interactive development and debugging capabilities, RIDE brings a comparable level of capability to environments which were previously limited to only TTY-based terminal interaction.
About a dozen more FinnAPL members joined us for the afternoon session where I spoke about some of the recent features of Dyalog. We discussed Function Trains, the Rank operator, the Key operator and user commands. We looked at both recently introduced and some of the long-established user commands. I demonstrated how to create a new user command (command AIKA=TIME in Finnish!) and how to debug it before letting the group conclude their meeting.
The day ended with nearly all of us going out for dinner and a few drinks in Helsinki, which looked wonderful with all its Christmas decorations. It’s always a pleasure to be able to sit down, share time and exchange ideas with fellow APLers.
All in all, a good day!
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