Editorial: APL in Business

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 3

Swansea University is host to the conference APL in Business (18-22 July 1994) which is to be sponsored by the European Business Management School with the support of the British APL Association and the British Computer Society.

What are we Trying to Do?¶

We discussed at length how best to organise and sell a conference. The miracle at St Petersburg; APL 92 and the superlative programme for APL 93 are hard acts to follow. Nevertheless these are our suggestions:

• Improved value for companies sending staff and for vendors
• Promote good uses of APL more effectively
• Make profits to give strength to APL organisations for years ahead.

Value for Money¶

Too many advertisements for conferences begin with the attractions of the location, with the tours and with the entertainment. Anyone would think that the most important people to attract were the accompanying persons. It is overwhelmingly companies who send people to conferences. A few people will come to every conference they can afford at private expense, but not many. It is companies we have to persuade that they will get value for money by sending their staff. If it looks like a holiday then only generous companies who want to reward their staff may send people — only may.

An APL conference is not a holiday camp and should not look like one. Persuade the employers that APL conferences are harder work than any course and will improve their programmers’ performance better than any course and we will be able to raise the price and have to turn away the late-comers. Conferences must be good value for the vendors too. It is ridiculous to prohibit sales at conferences. Vendors should be encouraged to sell books, disks, programs, workspaces of utilities, interpreters, interfaces between different flavours of APL and the major spreadsheets, databases, word processors and other packages. Why not persuade companies that there will be products on sale that they cannot afford to be without?

Promoting Good Use of APL¶

A conference which promises to teach its delegates how to use APL well starts off on the right foot. A conference which promises to teach techniques which other disciplines can use with advantage will also spread the word about APL. We ought to offer to teach people who use a technique how they can do it easier with APL than any other way. There are many techniques where APL has much to offer. Hard-headed people choose APL and some are willing to say why. The best way to promote something is to show it to the people who would benefit from it. We are surrounded by examples of APL’s advantages and we scarcely use them.

Making a Profit¶

To make a profit from running a conference we must persuade people to come. The best way is to make it irresistible to the people who spend company training budgets. To stand a credible chance of delivering what we promise the conference program should be planned. Only part of the conference should depend on what papers arrive in the post unasked for. The plenary speakers should be acknowledged experts in their fields with reputations as excellent teachers, commissioned to produce the material required.

The atmosphere should be of work too. More sessions should be spent sitting at a computer per delegate. There should be competitions and workshops. Sessions should be long enough for something to be learned. Many sessions are too short for the presenter to do more that tell the audience what a wonderful product he has to sell. Good planning of the accommodation and conference facilities is the other secret. The conference should break even with a pessimist’s view of the number of delegates and should have as much headroom as possible where every additional delegate adds ninety percent of his fee to the profit and ten percent of it to the costs.

APL is Still a Success¶

The whole thing depends on the continued success of APL. There are more APLers in the world today than ever. APL innovation is far from dead. There are now at least four GUI APLs. You can now write Windows applications in APL as well as, but faster than you can in Visual Basic. You can link APL to other systems and share data, and with Object Linking and Embedding the data can be updated dynamically by APL running in the background. APL still delivers working systems faster; they are still more reliable and they look as good as those produced any other way.