Membership Questionnaire

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 36

For APLication last year we devised a survey for people to fill in. Although it was by no means constructed according to orthodox statistical procedures, we hoped that our little questionnaire would tell us something about the people attending the Conference, and thereby perhaps provide us with a snap-shot of a ‘typical’ APLer (if there is such a thing). We have finally got round to analysing the results and hope that readers of VECTOR will find them as fascinating as we did!

Our first question asked which types of APL people used. IBM will be pleased to learn that APL2 won in the popularity stakes (I can assure readers that this was not because we had a lot of people from IBM fill in the forms!). Most people, however, said they used more than one type of APL. After APL2, it was pretty close between VS APL and APL*Plus (mainframe and PC). (Sorry Dyadic and I P Sharp!)

Our second question asked how many people the respondent knew personally who write APL programs. Answers here varied from “NIL” (from Richard Webber up at Doncaster Metropolitan Institute of Higher Education) to “HUNDREDS” (Dick Bowman exaggerating, of course!). In fact, the highest ‘score’ goes again to IBM, where one respondent claimed to know 200 other APL programmers.

A totally statistically meaningless question (just to really get up the nose of all those statisticians) asked people to hazard a guess as to how many people they thought write APL programs in the UK, Europe and the World (we left out the Universe). Surprisingly, most people said about the same – between 500 and 2000 in the UK, between 5000 and 10,000 in Europe and 10,000 to 50,000 world-wide. (There were some silly answers of course, which I have conveniently omitted). Has anybody got any real figures here? It would be interesting to know.

We then had a really sexist question – ‘How many women do you know who write APL programs?’ We included this because we suspected that the majority of APLers are male and we wanted to check this out. However, although 18% said they didn’t know any, and 25% only knew one, surprisingly 21% said they knew more than 10 women who write APL programs, so perhaps there are more of them about than we suspected! Despite the fact that 90% of our respondents were male, over half of them said they worked with women who were writing APL programs, which I find very encouraging (so why weren’t more of them at the Conference then, or maybe they just don’t like filling in questionnaires?).

Our next question asked how many days per month the respondent spent writing APL programs. Of the replies, exactly half said that they spent more than 10 days per month, although almost 18% said that they spent no more than 2 days per month actually writing APL programs, and 3 people said they did no programming at all in APL (one of these is a Manager, one an Economist and I don’t know what the third does but I suspect he is also a Manager as he later put down that he had learnt APL over five years ago).

Although the vast majority of the people who completed our questionnaire were employed by very large companies, half said that, where they worked, there were no more than five other people writing APL programs. This confirms our suspicions that APL tends to be found in ‘small pockets’ within large organisations. These organisations included companies in the Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing and Energy Industries, with colleges of further education being quite well represented. Surprisingly, there were not many people from government or local authorities (perhaps because their budgets are too tight to allow employees to attend APL conferences?).

A telling question was ‘When did you first learn APL?’. This was designed to establish the ‘age’ of the APL population and to find out whether there is much new blood coming into the language. A staggering 71% learnt APL over five years ago, with only 10% having come into it within the past three years. (One person – the Economist – put that he had never learnt it. It would be interesting to discover if he found the conference useful and whether he was inspired to learn APL afterwards.)

Most people had been on a course to learn, and the vast majority of them (88%) said that they thought the course worthwhile (a pat on the back for the C & D trainers here, I suspect!).

Slightly more than a third write APL programs to produce results which are used by other people, a third produce systems which are used by non-programming staff, while just over a quarter produce systems and programs which are used by other APL programmers. Unfortunately, 79% said they did not have any budgetary authority (were we preaching to the converted at Canterbury and perhaps more emphasis should be placed on attracting Managers and others who hold the purse-strings if the use of APL is to increase?)

More than 50% said that they thought their company used contract programmers occasionally, but by far the most telling (and depressing) indicator of the extent to which APL usage is expanding came with the results of our last couple of questions, concerning the recruitment of permanent staff. We asked ‘How many people have been recruited by your company/department over the past year?’ and ‘Of these, how many were replacements for people who had left, and how many were new vacancies?’. Almost 60% said that no APLers had been recruited where they worked over the past 12 months, and a total of over 98% said that the number recruited was between NIL and 2. Of these, over half of all new recruits were to replace people who had left. Not very good news for those of us keen to see an expansion in the use of the language.

So what picture does this give us of our typical APLer? I would say, from these results, our typical APLer is probably male, works within a large organisation employing a handful of other people writing APL programs (some of whom might be female!), learnt APL more than five years ago and uses APL2, VS APL and maybe APL*Plus to write programs, the results of which are used by other people within the company. He probably found his job (via APL People, of course!) when the person who was there before left. In fact, what we knew all along! Apologies to all those who don’t fit this stereotype, which is probably most of you reading this article.