APL as a Tool of Thought X, Hoboken, NJ, January 31, 1998

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 69

It was a brisk and beautiful day for the Tenth APL as a Tool of Thought. Held at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, at the top of a bluff overlooking the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, NY/SIGAPL could not have selected a better venue for this latest in a series begun in 1983. As has been the tradition, nearly every speaker submitted a paper to be published in the proceedings.

The day began with a leisurely cup of coffee and a Danish pastry or NYC bagel over which attendees could greet old friends, make new acquaintances, and peruse the proceedings. The opening plenary session contained two surprises: Adin Falkoff was invited from somewhere in the depths of retirement to present the Iverson Award to John McPherson, APL’s elder statesman. McPherson is a handsome eighty-eight year old gentleman with a ruddy face and twinkle in his eye who was IBM’s first technical vice president. He brought Ken Iverson (who was also present) to IBM’s System Research Institute, where Ken taught what was then called the Iverson Notation. John has been a strong supporter of APL, particularly within IBM, ever since it came into being. He has also provided consistent encouragement for the Tool of Thought seminars and has attended nearly all of them.

Eric Baelen gave an enthusiastic plenary talk encouraging all of us to keep the faith. He presented an impressive list of companies in a variety of businesses that have used APL as the basis for their success.

From all reports, the quality of the presentations, of which there were fourteen or so, in three parallel sessions, was generally excellent.

Of those I attended, I was particularly impressed by what Richard Krafchin has built for the five person promotional advertising company that he and his wife run. The functionality is powerful — everything they need to administer their operation from recording phone messages, planning projects, accessing historical costs, and maintaining the current accounts. On top of that Rich has experimented with the user interface to make it as simple, easy to use, and attractive as someone in advertising might expect. Who needs MS Office, Lotus Smart Suite, or an Oracle database? Not he. He has built it all with APL.

Eric Iverson gave a clear and straight-forward presentation of object oriented programming (Classes are collections of data and methods. Objects are an instance of a class. Methods are functions.) and demonstrated how it will be implemented in J’s next release in March. Will others follow suit?

Linda Alvord combined her artistic, mathematical, and programming talents in J to do what she calls Derivatives for Dancing and what might also be called Computational Origami. Writing in J, she created figures such as a boat or a fish and moved them along a curve so that the figure used the derivative of the function/tangent to the curve as its base, causing the figure to appear to move in a natural fashion along the path of the function.

Now that other interpreters such as Java have become accepted as legitimate programming tools, Fred Waid feels that SGML and its offspring: HTML, XML, SMIL, and what have you on the Internet, offer a unique opportunity for APL to shine. With an interactive multimedia web broadcast as an example, Fred suggested that the rapid development time, computational power, and speed of APL can give APL a real competitive advantage to those willing to use it in this seemingly alien environment.

Do you think the Y2K problem is a lot of hype? There certainly is hype, but it seems to be warranted. Clement Kent suggests that it is even worse than people think. In an engaging presentation, he demonstrated that not only is the year a problem, but the leap day, and other days are as well. It’s not clear how many programmers know the rules of leap years, particularly the third rule: century divisible by 400. Horrible events like the two aluminium smelters that crashed and burned on February 29, 1988 may occur on a broader scale. Obsolete, unsupported air traffic control computers, mainframe computers that use as a reference clocks in Geodesic satellites that will reset to zero (because of a ten-bit data store) on August 22, 1999, and Internet routers sold as recently as July, 1997 that will crash on January 1, 2000 make one contemplate going back to nature for a while.

The day ended with an entertaining talk by Gary Bergquist, whose programming skills are well known, but whose talent as a standup comedian is not. He had us all laughing with him as he dryly and strongly defended APL as A Perfect Language!

NB. The Proceedings which include other papers such as Armstrong and Objects, Bernecky and Compilation, Bhizever and GUI Design, Graham and APL Zero, Karman and Pension Projections, McCormick and Bayesian Modelling, and Mansour and Non-looping Mortgages, are available from NY/SIGAPL for $15.