APL Press Review

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 27

Our irregular feature on the press coverage that APL receives is by definition limited to the publications that we, or our various spies around the world, peruse. This issue I feel sure that several articles must have slipped our net.

Our coverage was enhanced by a weighty bundle that fell through my letter-box, coincidentally all covering a certain supplier’s new product announcements. Top of the pile was the extract from the December ’85 issue of Sinclair Gebruiker. I just about struggled through the translation of:

“Micro APL voor de QL”

and discovered that the Dutch for “diskette” is “floppy”, before abandoning the exercise for more productive tasks.

One of the English competitors of Sinclair Gebruiker must be Sinclair/QL World, and their April issue also had a two page introduction to this “more exotic language” now available on the QL. I’m not sure how many of the “floating voters” will have got far beyond the introductory paragraph:

“Though getting a little long in the tooth, having been around since the 1960s, APL . . . has a small but loyal following.”

The rest of the article described some of the features of APL and of the QL implementation, concentrating on some aspects of the keyword facility. Unfortunately it never really explained why you would want to use APL instead of SuperBasic, so it’s unlikely to bring about the mass conversion of all C5 users to APL.

Another of my spies sent me an extract from Minicomputer News, but unfortunately the date was cut off so I can’t identify the exact issue. The context was quite interesting being one of those rare occasions when an application using APL is mentioned without a great song and dance about a strange back-to-front language written in Greek. The application was a foreign exchange pilot system for the Midland Bank Group Treasury. As the Microsystems manager said:

“We had three things going for us. A bunch of ATs; . . . some nine months’ experience of the G/Net IBM PC local area network; . . . in-house expertise in APL, which is ideal for recalculating matrices of numbers.”

Nearer to home, VECTOR itself has being receiving publicity from Datalink. The April 21st issue picked up my own call for a marketing campaign to boost interest in APL (Editorial – VECTOR Vol.2, No.3). I was indeed very impressed by the alacrity of their reporter who was on the phone the day after the issue had been posted. “Is it really as bad as that?” he asked. His article followed up my own comments with those of Romilly Cocking who:

“claimed there was a ‘steady spread of understanding’ which was enough to keep up the impetus behind the language.”

VECTOR obviously gets passed quickly around the Datalink office, because by the following week, its GIGO column was doing its best to spread misunderstanding about APL and revealing major divisions within the ranks of our very own working group!

“Elsewhere in the same issue a press review by Steve Lyus seems to call some of Preedy’s arguments into question in its extremely vigorous defence of all that is APL.”

It seems that the merest hint that APL might make some sacrifice in terms of performance and machine efficiency (albeit to gain significant benefits in terms of development times), is tantamount to a statement that “APL gobbles up machine resources like nobody’s business”! The tragedy is that such attitudes prevent anyone trying to develop a rational debate about the types of application where APL is or is not a suitable language to use.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of doing a press review is looking for the “ones that got away”, those articles that cry out for a mention of APL and yet it never comes. This time the prize goes to Computer Weekly (May 1st) which unveiled “how we arrived at such a prolific number of programming languages”. Despite this prolific number, the table headed “Significant programming languages” includes only 10 – Fortran, Algol, Cobol, Basic, RPG, PL/1, Coral, Pascal, C and Ada.

My thanks to all those who have sent in the cuttings they have noticed. No doubt next issue will report the worldwide coverage of APL86.