An article not about APL

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 7

I enjoy reading your editorial, it said there is not enough submission on APL. But in the same issue, there is an article “The Development and Q/A Process at Microsoft, US”. It does not relate to APL, J, K nor array-thinking in general.

Why is this article included for publication?

[Editor’s reply]

Thank you for your compliments. It’s not actually a contradiction that, since we are lacking a bit APL contributions, we have to resort to contributions that cross the boundaries of being strictly on topic. Actually, I find hard when talking about a computer language to avoid talking about development in general. And the article, summary of a talk presented at the Finnish APL meeting, is in my opinion quite interesting because it highlights some fundamental points about software development and project management. In particular Extreme Programming seems to be a hot topic and I am trying to learn something about it to see if it can be applied to APL teams as well. Maybe Vector should be a technical magazine devoted to the APL language only (or maybe to Array Oriented Languages with some relationship to APL only) and should leave more general discussion topics to other magazines. I, for one, would find it limiting, the way knowing only one computer language in today’s world is limiting. But if you think that we should be more selective about the published papers, please, let us know. While it’s true that Vector can be a fun game for us, we are also trying to give a service to our readers and as such we should try and improve the quality of it by listening to the readers’ comments.