Reflections of Another

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 59

I saw a lot of reflections of Antwerp, since it rained every day I was there. Luckily I did not go for the sight-seeing, but rather for the APL, or rather, the APLers. I made a few new friends, and met many old ones, but sadly many were missing.

Most of the papers covered the “same old ground” but there were a few papers breaking new ground, in particular Pavel Luksha’s “Probabilistic Studies of I CHING with the Help of APL” and Gérard Langlet’s “The APL Theory of Human Vision”.

As for the Vendors, in the Windows arena Manugistics and Dyadic were battling it out, both giving good accounts of themselves. IBM appeared to be retreating into its OS/2 corner while Iverson Software’s J for Windows seems to be gaining ground. J Locales vs Dyadic Namespaces appears to be the next big fight, or is it between J and Manugistics over control structures?

The closing session was “Acquisition and Processing Data from Normal and Cancer Cells” by the Nobel prize winner Dr Ivar Giaever. As an APL consultant I found this session very interesting. More importantly however, it contained two messages to all APL vendors. If you want to sell APL (or J for that matter) to scientists doing research you must have direct IEEE support and you must have a Plot primitive. (This last point about a plot primitive was also made by Dr Walter Spunde in his paper on the “The Impact of APL on First Year Mathematics”.)

And finally a few key phrases.

“The consequence of the symbols is the symbols of the consequence.”

“Peace in our time, stop the war between APLs.”

Lots of “Little Trojan horses” in our code.

Vendors saying that their Windows Driver was easy to learn is a bit like the Nepalese Tourist Board saying:

“We have lots of very nice mountains, and they are all very easy to climb.”