Ron Murray is a recent addition to the Dyalog team, with a long history in the APL community. He first encountered APL/360 in 1969 and was hooked. He used it as the basis for teaching Computer Science courses for the Hampton, Virginia High Schools. Then, working with other APL pioneers, he wrote several APL applications and contributed to five different APL implementations at The Computer Company, STSC, Burroughs, Data Resources, and Analogic Corporation.

From 1986 until 2019 he left the world of APL to develop software on Microcomputers for Microsoft and Amazon, where he contributed to various development projects for Windows, OS/2, NT, Visual Basic, Encarta, and a variety of projects within the Microsoft Research Division as well the Developer Relations Group. He also contributed to the scalability and reliability of the Amazon transaction accounting system and the Windows Azure Archival Storage System.

He also ran an Aviation business for several years at the Tacoma Narrows airport, and started an internet television company with three friends. Together they learned a lot about crawling the web using machine learning, categorizing videos by their subject matters and quality, as well as constructing interactive user interfaces on IOS devices.

During all that non-APL work he continued to use APL as a tool of thought for organizing, analyzing, and clarifying the work that needed to be done.

Since July of 2020 he’s been applying the many non-APL things he’s learned to help extend and improve the Dyalog APL systems and their interactions with the rest of the computing world.

He points out that Windows 95, which is now 25 years old is about half as old as the APL/360 release!

Stine graduated from Copenhagen Business School with a Masters degree in Business Administration and Information Management in 2016, and went to work for a small consultancy firm. She started with “Drag&Drop” programming in SSIS and other similar tools, but quickly moved into project management, accounting, and Business Intelligence.

Covid-19 intervened just as she was looking forward to coming back from maternity leave, and she decided not to burden her previous employer by returning to a job as a consultant in a world where no-one really wanted external consultants for an unknown length of time. Since Dyalog was looking for a new accountant due to Helene’s retirement, she accepted that job. She hopes that she will soon have an opportunity to help the development team with project management as well.

If her last name sound somewhat familiar, it is because Stine is closely related to Gitte and Morten! Stine grew up in a household where APL was a part of everyday life. After swimming against the tide for many years she finally accepted a bet with Morten to give his “hobby” (APL) a try if he gave her hobby (Roleplaying) a try in return. As a result, she spent 2 weeks in Montreal trying to learn from one of the best teachers of APL. But while she learned a little French from staying at Dan Baronet’s house, the APL did not really stick. Morten sadly never got around to roleplaying, but he did take up Zumba many years later, so they consider the deal settled!

Several years later, while looking for something to do as a summer job, she took a job at Insight Systems learning APL while proofreading the new Dyalog APL book by Bernard Legrand and correcting data in the CRM system.

For several years she was hired to help run the help desk at the user meetings whenever they took place in Denmark. Her last appearance at a Dyalog user meeting was as a Zumba instructor in 2012 in Elsinore.

Stine has spent most of her life dancing around the edges of Dyalog, coming to the user meetings and chatting with customers and developers alike, hanging out at the office in Bramley, listening in whenever Gitte and Morten talked shop at the dinner table, trying to learn APL, but realizing that where her heart truly lies is in organizing and managing things. So, while working for an APL company feels like coming home, her ambition is not to take part in development, but instead to take care of all the details and bureaucracy so that the rest of our brilliant team can focus on what they truly love!

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.

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.

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.