A Comment on “Announcing The APL Review”

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 10

I do think a new, refereed APL Journal will be more harmful than beneficial to the APL community, for the following reasons:

• There are some good APL newsletters such as Quote Quad, Vector and local publications that need material of high quality. Since the APL community is not growing, introducing yet another journal would lower the quantity and quality of material available to the established publications.

• Quote Quad, being an ACM SIG newsletter, has the largest visibility outside the APL community. To strengthen the outreach of APL into the computer community at-large, we need to strengthen Quote Quad.

• More reports on applications of APL should be directed to non-APLers, in publications that are not specific to APL. The yearly APL conferences suffice to report APL stories to APLers; but we need to tell more about our applications to application users and to the software community at large.

• Formal papers about the APL language and system could reach a wider audience by publication in other ACM newsletters and journals, such as SIGPLAN Notices, LOPLAS, or TOPLAS. These communities hardly know that APL is alive and evolving; yet they have a great decision power in education and industry.

• The quality of APL specific material geared to APL users could as well be enhanced by introducing a reviewing process for APL journals such as Vector; many articles could be edited and condensed to serve the readers better. I know and appreciate that the work of volunteers cannot match the professionalism and resources of major trade publications such as Byte; but this would presumably be the case for a new journal as well.

In publications, as in APL coding, less can be more!

Martin Gfeller
Reuters SA Risk Management Software