Report from APL85 — APL and the Future

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 67

The conference spanned 4 days with Tuesday and Wednesday by far the most hectic. By bag-on-a-string-making-weak-brown-liquid-time I found I was saturated with information and felt like doing nothing but settling down with a nice steaming pot of tea for the rest of the day. But this was not to be. On Tuesday the conference committee had organised an evening boat trip across the Puget Sound with food and entertainment in the Indian village of Tillicum. And on Wednesday was the conference banquet including a very humorous talk by Andrew Tobias. Since the talk was basically how to make money playing the stock market it went down particularly well with the majority of the audience.

On the serious side there were also tutorials, panel discussions, open discussions, an exhibition, and vendor’s presentations. The tutorials and panel discussions worked particularly well. The exhibition was more variable: just about everyone was there, including our own association selling copies of Vector like hot cakes (or potatoes?); STSC, Dyadic, and Analogic had the most impressive implementations all winning prizes in the computer-off competitions; IBM’s stand was rather disappointing and seemed to lack the commitment of others; IP Sharp’s main distinction was their complete absence from the exhibition (our loss or their loss?).

The conference spanned 4 days with Tuesday and Wednesday by far the most hectic. By bag-on-a-string-making-weak-brown-liquid-time I found I was saturated with information and felt like doing nothing but settling down with a nice steaming pot of tea for the rest of the day. But this was not to be. On Tuesday the conference committee had organised an evening boat trip across the Puget Sound with food and entertainment in the Indian village of Tillicum. And on Wednesday was the conference banquet including a very humorous talk by Andrew Tobias. Since the talk was basically how to make money playing the stock market it went down particularly well with the majority of the audience.

For me the conference was a wonderful blend of going to new places, expensive breakfasts, APL, new friends, Space Needles, mountains, APL, clam chowders, ’plane rides, APL, jig-saws, trees, APL, monorails, APL, and more APL. All of those at APL85 were looking forward to APL86 and meeting up with old and new friends in Manchester. I hope I can be there and hope you can make it too.

The conference papers were quite varied and yet one or two topics seemed to keep cropping up: viz education, teaching, and learning; APL2; and efficiency of APL (all of which are important aspects for the future of the language). It is difficult to recommend particular papers since their interest will depend on why you are interested in APL. Some of them may seem irrelevant to the environment you are working in. Nevertheless the papers on GKS, Teaching ‘Bugs’, Improving Performance with APs, Operators for Program Control, and the Introduction to STSC’s Compiler are especially worth reading by anyone with a view to APL and the future.