news from Dyalog

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 12

Dyalog Ltd¶

Thanks again to everyone who visited Dyalog’06, including our friends from APL2000, Kx Systems and MicroAPL, who joined us on the “Array Language Day” and showed how everyone is working hard to make Array Languages more competitive and available on a wide variety of platforms.

We hope that this tradition of running array language conferences in conjunction with one of the vendor conferences each year will be continued – and also that array language vendors will join us in making “APL and family” visible members of the Agile Community. Join us at XP2007 in June in picturesque Como, Italy!

Dyalog Version 11.0¶

It is more than a little embarrassing to look back see how many times we changed the predicted date for the availability of version 11.0, but it is now available! At the time this is printed in Vector, I expect 32- and 64-bit Windows to be generally available. Linux, Windows Mobile 5, and AIX versions should be close to release. Contact us regarding availability for other platforms.

If we say so ourselves, we believe it was worth waiting for! We accept that many of our existing users are very busy and will be slow to make use of many new features. However, the response to presentations at Dyalog’06 makes us believe that the object oriented features in Version 11.0, and the related support for writing Dyalog components which are stored in script form will revolutionize the way we do development, over the next decade or so.

If this sounds worrying, relax: You have our word that Object Oriented Dyalog will NEVER mean that users who enjoy functional array programming will be forced to create even a single class. And, even for those who do go for script-based development, it will be possible to develop and debug applications using the rapid iterative prototyping mode which we all demand.

The ability to integrate with industry standard development tools, have our source managed by popular source code management systems, embed code in web page scripts (etc), will also change the view that many non-APL developers have of us. If we produce the necessary examples and training materials, and make Dyalog easily available to anyone who wants to take a look, it should not take long for it to be accepted as a powerful scripting tool along with popular languages like Perl, Python and Ruby. We should be able to attract a large number of new users to take a look at what we have to offer, and we know that APL has a number of advantages over the other languages – at least for certain types of applications.

Low-cost Licenses¶

The free educational and low cost non-commercial licenses for Dyalog are now almost a year old, and we have been very pleased by the response. If only a fraction of the licenses shipped end up being used for real work, this initiative is going to lead to noticeable growth in our user community.

As we enter 2007, we expect the interest to increase significantly when we release version 11.0 for Linux under the same terms as the free and low-cost Windows licenses. We also plan to make it easier to request and subsequently download these licenses from our web page.

Training Courses¶

At Dyalog’06, we provided two full days of training in connection with the conference. Five different courses were provided; on the new object oriented functionality, on interfacing to Microsoft.Net, building web pages using APL, performing “office automation” tasks from APL, and on accessing databases from APL. We will be posting as much of this material as we can to our web page during November, so that it is generally available. We are also considering re-running the courses in various locations across the globe if there is sufficient demand. Please contact Dyalog if your company or a local user group would like to arrange a course.