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Joel Hough, Student Univeristy of Utah and First Place winner of Dyalog APL Programming Contest
Joel Hough is a student of computer science at the University of Utah. Joel spent a few years writing software for an X-Ray device manufacturing company before giving it up to go to school. Joel's interest in novel programming languages led him to the Dyalog APL programming contest, where last year he took third place and this year took first.
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Presentation: "Why APL is Still Cool"Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:50 Location: Olympic
Abstract:
Agile software development, which APL users will claim has been in widespread use in the APL community since the 1970's has finally been named by the mainstream. APL is no longer alone in having data-parallel constructs or a "function-oriented" approach to programming. Many other features which were pioneered by APL implementers and users decades ago - such as (safe) dynamic typing, garbage collection, column-store databases, keyed index object stores, and "in-memory OLAP" (which made APL the curse of many a mainframe system administrator in the 1980's) have been absorbed into mainstream products. Why then, as the APL community prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Kenneth Iverson's book titled "A Programming Language" in 2012, do many APL users still claim that the main obstacle to widespread adoption of APL is that the notation is still ahead of its time? This session will offer some possible answers to this question, and also discuss the potential of APL as vehicle for putting parallel processing at the fingertips of both programmers and domain experts. |
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