Guest Editorial: APL86 – Be there

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

As I write this (on a particularly sour January day in London) I realise that the nucleus of the APL86 committee has been working on the conference for about two years already; we’re now only about five months away from the moment of truth. In any effort like this the questions to be asked are has it been worth it for us, and will it be worth it for you when you come? Of course it has, and of course it will be. What else would you expect?

Timing’s an interesting thing – by the time you read this we’re going to be a great deal further advanced in our detail planning than we are now but already those of us who’ve been looking at the many papers contributed have read much fascinating material that will only reach the delegates in July. If there’s one regret we have it’s that even after we’ve extended the conference to run the whole week from Monday to Friday with an additional optional pre-conference Education Day we’ve still had to leave out so much that was useful, fascinating and unique. We hope that the authors will allow us, and the VECTOR group can find room, to print many of these overflow papers in the coming months.

As one of our predecessors told us, the programme’s 25 percent of a conference, the exhibition’s another 25 percent, and the atmosphere makes up the rest. We know about the programme, and we know that we’ve been so heavily booked by exhibitors that we’ve had to expand from two exhibition halls to three. You can read some of the details later on, and you should have received your delegate pack some weeks ago. The other fifty percent is coming from you.

The committee has set up an environment – we have an excellent venue in the heart of Manchester – whatever you want to do at a conference we can almost certainly offer the facilities. Tell us your plans before you arrive and we’ll do everything we can to make sure you meet the people who’ll transform them into reality. Some of the preceding APL conferences have built up an imposing precedent – we met someone only loosely connected with the APL world – when we told him that we were organising APL86 his comment was “Oh yes, I went to APL79, it was the best computer conference I’ve ever been to (and the only APL conference)”.

We believe that APL86 is going to be like that; book early though – Manchester’s a big place but even there we might run out of space.

APL 86 Education Open Day: Programme¶

Except during the opening and closing plenary sessions there will be a large display of micro-computer implementations of APL available for hands-on trials with knowledgeable attendants to give assistance and demonstrations and a wide range of books to browse and literature to carry away. Thus, any delegate feeling the formal session is not his 'cup-of-tea' can instead take a leisurely look at the scope of the language.