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.

Joel Hough, Student Univeristy of Utah and First Place winner of Dyalog APL Programming Contest

 Joel  Hough 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.

Morten Kromberg, APL Expert

 Morten  Kromberg

Morten Kromberg has been developing applications and tools for developers in APL since 1979 – almost ¾ of the time that has passed since the first APL interpreter saw the light of day in 1966 (coincidentally, this is roughly the same fraction of his own life). Amongst other things, he was the CTO of Adaytum Software from 1995 to 2000 (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Adaytum... where he was responsible for the development of a highly successful business planning solution based upon APL, which was subsequently acquired by Cognos and is currently known as IBM Cognos 8 Planning.

Since 2005, Morten has been the CTO of Dyalog Ltd (www.dyalog.com) , which has become the fastest-growing vendor of APL interpreters, based in Bramley (Hampshire), UK. Morten is a frequent speaker at APL conferences, and presented a paper titled “Arrays of Objects” at 2007 the symposium on Dynamic Languages, on the integration of object and array paradigms in Dyalog APL (http://portal.acm.org/citation...).

Twitter: @mkromberg