FinnAPL Meeting in Helsinki, November 26th 2015

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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

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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Response to Feedback on Cut, Under and Merge

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At Dyalog ’15 John Scholes and I presented proposals for future operators cut, under, and merge. Following the release of the video of this presentation, we received some feedback from a user. Our response to the feedback may be of wider interest.

  1. It’s early days yet for cut, under, and merge (they are tentatively planned for release in version 16.0), and one of the reasons for that is so that we can receive feedback from the user community. So thank you for your comments.
  2. We take our inspiration from many sources, and while it’s true that J has cut, under, and merge, cut saw the light of day in Rationalized APL (1983), under in Operators and Functions (1978), and merge in Rationalized APL (1983) again. And even before that, the ideas have been in mathematics or functional programming for many years.Wherever the inspiration came from, we don’t take them just on faith, just because they are in J.Even now, even in these early days, cut, under, and merge have undergone a vigorous internal debate. The discussion is informed by the experience in other contexts, J or otherwise.
  3. We are interested in what you think are the “few fundamental ideas expressed by a handful of mathematical symbols”, what you say is the definition of APL. From our perspective we have not violated and will not violate what we think are the fundamental ideas. But perhaps our set of fundamental ideas differ from yours?
  4. No one here is thinking of adopting the J spelling scheme (with the dots and colons).
  5. The Dyalog development team are in unanimous agreement that dfns, ⍺⍵-functions, are A Good Thing. As we see it, the recent and proposed additions to Dyalog APL have only enhanced the elegance and utility of dfns. For example, {(+⌿⍵)÷≢⍵}⍤r to compute the mean of not just vectors but subarrays of a specified rank, {⍺⍵}⌸ to compute the unique keys and the corresponding indices, {⍺(+⌿⍵)}⌸ to compute the unique keys and corresponding sums, and {⊂Cut ¯2⊢⍵,','}Cut ¯2 ⊢x~⎕av[4] to partition CSV x into its columns and cells.
  6. Cut, under, and merge are described and documented in discussion papers accompanying the video. If you have not already read them, they can be found in the Dyalog ’15 webpage and specifically here. Please tell us what more can be done as far as documentation, and what parts specifically are unclear.
  7. We have previously (and recently) examined the question of adding quaternions to Dyalog. Currently there are no plans to add them.
  8. Finally, examples of under from everyday life. Of course the processes involved can be composed, so that for example “dinner” can be: 
    open the fridge
    take the food
close the fridge

    but it can also be a more elaborate:

    take plate from cupboard
    open the fridge
        take the food
    close the fridge
 
    put food on plate
        open mouth
            put food in mouth
        close mouth
    clean plate
put plate back into cupboard

    As remarked in the Dyalog ’15 presentation, once you are attuned to it you can see under everywhere, sometimes in subtle ways: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

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SWEDAPL Meeting in Malmö, November 11th 2015

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The November cycle of APL User Meetings is kicking off; the SWEDAPL meeting in Malmö was first this year, holding a meeting at the top of the famous Turning Torso in Malmö. Since it was just a short trip from our Danish office, Dyalog was represented by Gitte Christensen, Bjørn Christensen and Morten Kromberg – with Brian Becker and Dan Baronet joining the meeting remotely. Next week, Richard Smith and Nick Nickolov will be representing Dyalog at APL Germany in Erfurt and Dan Baronet at FinnAPL in Helsinki – check http://dyalog.com/dates-for-your-diary.htm periodically for a list of APL meetings and Dyalog presentations!

Gilgamesh Athoraya welcomes us to SWEDAPL

Gilgamesh Athoraya welcomes us to SWEDAPL

This turned out to be a very international group – ten Swedes (two of whom were from India but based in Göteborg), six Danes who made the trip across the sound, two from the UK, one German and one delegate from each of Serbia and the Ukraine – plus about five North Americans who joined the afternoon sessions via GoToMeeting. This was the first “themed” SWEDAPL meeting; all of the talks were related to the use of Web Services in APL.

First up was our host Gilgamesh Athoraya from Data Analytics in Malmö, who showed us how he had been using Paul Mansour’s new RUMBA application interface which is built on top of Dyalog’s TCP toolkit (which is known as CONGA). Gil has been experimenting with support for Web Sockets, which are bi-directional connections that allow the server to push data to web client applications, making it possible to have very responsive user interfaces in web applications.

Joakim Hårsman explaining how slippery SOAP can be

Joakim Hårsman explaining how slippery SOAP can be


The next presentation was by Joakim Hårsman of CompuGroup Medical, who have been exposing data held on IBM AIX servers via Microsoft.NET-based Web Services for many years. Joakim had a few interesting stories to tell about getting a grip on and maintaining Web Services based on the protocol known as SOAP, which is supposed to make this easy…

The last talk before lunch was by Stephan Poßberg of Vallourec, who talked about the use of Web Services to make computational code available across a large, global organisation. Lunch was served on the 54th floor; unfortunately the weather didn’t quite allow us to see all the way to Helsingør.

The Turning Torso in the Mist, After Dark

The Turning Torso in the Mist, After Dark

After lunch, it was Morten’s turn, assisted by Brian Becker (who joined the meeting from Rochester NY) to present Dyalog’s brand new support for RESTFul web services, available in MiServer 3.0. Paul Mansour also joined this session and provided valuable insights into REST technology, which seems to be taking over as the preferred Web Service architecture for new applications.

Finally, Peter Simonsson from Aplensia in Göteborg told us how Web Services had become widespread at Volvo Cars, where a couple of hundred APL-based services provide the backbone of a network of applications centered around product data and production planning – with the earliest web services dating back to the days when APL ran under VM on IBM Mainframes.

Many thanks to Gilgamesh, Data Analytics and Optima Systems for arranging this event, which provided much food for thought, and inspiration for future work by several people at Dyalog – and by the sound of it, a number of users of APL as well! Expect to see more support for Web Services and Sockets in future versions of Dyalog products!

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Over the Moon with Selenium

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Over the years, I have become more and more reluctant to write code without good regression tests – 35 years of software development have taught me that it is just too dangerous! Regression testing of user interfaces has always been difficult, but for the last few weeks I have been working with technologies that put user interface testing within easy reach: HTML and the Selenium WebDriver, which star in the following video (if you can wait, read the full story below the video before watching):

This is exciting – I hope you can see why I am “over the moon” (apart from Selene being the Greek Moon Goddess).

Modern Markup Languages

One of the good things about modern User Interfaces based on markup languages like HTML is that logical information about the user interface is available at runtime. For example, a browser displaying HTML maintains a “Document Object Model” of the web page. The content and other attributes of each element within the DOM can be inspected and manipulated at runtime by a testing tool – this is what Selenium does.

Selenium

Selenium is a widely used open-source tool for automating browsers, with growing support from browser vendors. Selenium provides an API that allows you to perform just about any operation that a user could: click on buttons and select items from drop-downs, press keys to enter text, drag and drop items, or perform exact mouse movements and different types of clicks. Over the last few weeks, we have been working on a some thin covers for Selenium to make it easy to drive browsers from Dyalog APL. At the moment we require the Microsoft .NET bindings and can only do the testing from Microsoft Windows. The web server can be running anywhere, and we hope to add other client platforms in the future.

The results of this work are now available in the GitHub Repository Dyalog/Selenium. The following example, included in that repository, shows a simple test which verifies that the TryAPL website is able to execute a simple expression:

 ∇ r←Basic;S;result
 ⍝ Basic test that TryAPL is working - return error message if it isn't
 
 S←##.Selenium
 S.InitBrowser''
 S.GoTo'http://tryapl.org'
 
 'APLedit'S.SendKeys'1 2 3+4 5 6'
 S.('APLedit'SendKeys Keys.Return)
 result←'ClassName'S.Find'result'
 r←result S.WaitFor'5 7 9' '1 2 3+4 5 6 failed'
 ∇

MiServer Regression Testing

The primary motivation for this work has been to create regression test scripts for MiServer version 3.0. The MiServer regression testing mechanism is extremely simple (possibly a bit TOO simple, we’ll cross that bridge later): If a site contains a folder called “QA”, and the folders within mirror the structure of the web site, then a mechanism exists to load each page in turn and run the corresponding test function. You can read more about it on GitHub and see it working in the video at the top of this post.

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The Reflex/Commute Operator

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The monadic operator ⍨ is defined and modeled as follows:

     f⍨ ⍵  ←→  ⍵ f ⍵
   ⍺ f⍨ ⍵  ←→  ⍵ f ⍺

   {⍺←⍵ ⋄ ⍵ ⍺⍺ ⍺}

Reflex

Some common well-known functions can be written as f⍨ where f is itself a well-known function:

   +⍨    double
   ×⍨    square
   ?⍨    random permutation
   ⍳⍨    self-index, APL Amuse-Bouche 3

See http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Reflexive for further examples.

Awareness of the importance of the reflexive case might have led us to avoid the mistake in the definition of the dyadic case of ⍋. That is, if

   ⍺⍋⍵ ←→ ⍺⌷⍨⊂⍋⍵

then ⍋⍨⍵ would be sort. Ken Iverson seemed to have had this awareness because that’s how he defined the dyadic case of ⍋ in J. (I say “seemed” because he expressed surprise when first shown this use of ⍋⍨.)

The monadic case f⍨ came relatively late. It was not in Operators and Functions (1978) nor Rationalized APL (1983), and only introduced in A Dictionary of APL (1987). It came to Ken Iverson when he explicitly looked to natural languages for inspiration, whence it became “obvious”: f⍨⍵ ←→ ⍵ f ⍵ is the reflexive voice (je m’appelle Roger) and ⍺ f⍨ ⍵ ←→ ⍵ f ⍺ is the passive voice (the programming competition was won by a 17-year-old student vs. a 17-year-old student won the programming competition), both having evolved in natural languages for effective communication and elegant expression.

Commute

The alternative definition of ⍺⍋⍵ above, while illustrating the importance of the reflexive case (f⍨ ⍵), also illustrates the passive case (⍺ f⍨ ⍵). ⍺⌷⍨⊂⍋⍵ can be read and understood as “⍺ indexed by the enclosed grade of ⍵“, a different (and in my mind a better) emphasis than (⊂⍋⍵)⌷⍺, “the enclosed grade of ⍵, indexed into ⍺“.

I note that Arianna Locatelli, winner of the 2015 APL Problem Solving Competition but an APL beginner, used ⍨ twenty-one times in her presentation at Dyalog ’15. For example,⍨ was used in the computation of the standard deviation (slide 13):

   sol5←{a←,⍵ ⋄ ⊃0.5*⍨(⍴a)÷⍨+/2*⍨a-(⍴a)÷⍨+/a}

I believe this formulation comes naturally because ⍨ can be used to write functions in the order that they are applied. Another way to put it is that ⍨ reduces the need for long-scope parentheses. For example:

   (2×a) ÷⍨ (-b) (+,-) 0.5 *⍨ (b*2)-4×a×c
   ((-b) (+,-) ((b*2)-4×a×c)*0.5) ÷ 2×a

That ⍨ is easy to implement, {⍺←⍵ ⋄ ⍵ ⍺⍺ ⍺}, is neither here nor there; its value as a tool of thought is easily demonstrated.

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News from Causeway – SharpLeaf (Alpha Preview Now Available)

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For more than 20 years, Causeway has been developing APL tools to produce automated publication-quality graphics and typesetting. They differ from most modern technologies on mainly two points:

  • The API philosophy is to keep it simple and clean rather than complex and dirty, so that neat output can be generated with the bare minimum of coding
  • The implementation is a forward-going state machine, so that arbitrarily complex inclusions can be created instead of having the engine restricted by the object hierarchy

Following the emergence of the .NET platform in the 2000s, these products were fully refactored into a single package called SharpPlot; this is delivered both as a cross-platform APL workspace and as a stand-alone .NET assembly that can be used outside the APL world. The major benefit of doing this was that 20 years of patched-in functionality could be incorporated into a more consistent and better documented API (see http://www.sharpplot.com) – a side-effect is that the .NET assembly generally performs an order of magnitude faster than its APL counterpart.

SharpPlot, which has until now only comprised the chart generation engine (refactored RainPro product) now also includes SharpLeaf (refactored NewLeaf product).

Page from a sample report

Sample report page (click to enlarge)

The main features of SharpLeaf are:

  • Document Layout: a set of master pages defining paper size and rules for and color, boxes, images, fixed or parameterised text (for example, page number and date) etc.
  • Paragraph Styles (word processing): fine typesetting control over the text flow (font, alignment, spacing, indents, bullets, etc.)
  • Tables (spreadsheet processing): fine control over tabular presentation of data, including multi-page tables
  • Inclusions: text flow around objects such as images, charts, tables, dropped capitals or blank space

SharpPlot version 2.70 includes the first (alpha) version of SharpLeaf. SharpLeaf should be considered as being in its alpha stage (its API could change) with a GA release scheduled to be included with SharpPlot version 3.00 (due Q3 2015). Users are encouraged to try this alpha product and not only report any bugs but also provide feedback on the API and request enhancements. Please note that the SharpPlot engine is not expected to suffer any bugs with the addition of SharpLeaf as it is an independent product.

The alpha version can be requested by sending an email to support@dyalog.com

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