Editorial: The joys of Spring?

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

So Spring is here at last; the birds are in full song; the trees are budding; the sap is rising, and every young buck’s thoughts are directed to APL’86 in Manchester.

That’s all very well for them, but for those of us whose BAA committee regulation beards are starting to grey, there are other more weighty matters that must take precedence. It’s recruitment season, and we have to sit cloistered in darkened rooms, grilling the young aspirants whose very careers may depend on what we think of them.

For those of us who have deserted the big company scene to savour the delights of small business, the process is fairly nail-biting for the interviewers as well. After all the costs of a mistake are proportionately greater for a small team. Anyway, Curricula Vitae arrive by the sack-full and one’s thoughts are divided between the desire to recruit some really able people and the fear of what geniuses these people must be, who have achieved such startling exam results.

However during the process of vetting all these applicants, I was struck by the singular inappropriateness of what they were being taught – particularly those on computer-related courses. Are they being given the breadth of vision to devise inventive ways to use the rapidly-changing technology of today, let alone tomorrow? Far from it! In most cases, they are being fed regurgitated techniques that were probably state-of-the-art when their tutors were being educated, souped up with a couple of lectures on the latest fad – normally expert systems.

Now I’m not pretending that it would be possible to teach only subjects that are likely to be widely applicable in the outside world – there’s nothing to match commercial experience for that. However I would expect some of the students to emerge with an overview of the computing business. They should surely be exposed to the types of problem addressed by computer techniques and to the different sort of technique available. And that general background should at least include some study of the different types of programming language available. I don’t expect, or even want, a generation of graduates fluent in Lisp, Prolog, Cobol and APL. However I would like some of them to have heard of APL – or at least to be able to find out something about it in the library when they get back to college.

Of course my own experience and prejudices predicate that I will be looking for an appreciation of APL, but the issue is more general. If students never get the chance to even hear about one of the languages that has led the way in many application areas – graphics, decision support, information centres, financial planning, to name a few – then how can they hope to develop new and imaginative applications themselves over the next thirty years or so?

So this issue’s editorial ends with a three-fold challenge:

• to the APL community, to approach your local college and offer to give a brief series of talks to interested students, explaining why you use APL; better still lend them some kit and an interpreter;
• to the academic community, to ensure that all computing students at least can find out about APL and other minority programming languages – why not for instance subscribe to VECTOR and buy Gilman & Rose?
• to the students themselves, to choose courses that offer them a broad perspective of the field of computing and whose practical offerings involve more than writing an operating system (in BASIC) and programming someone else’s hidden-line removal algorithm.

Reminder¶

1986/87 subscriptions are now due. If you have not already paid your membership for the year, please return the enclosed renewal form with your cheque. Otherwise you will not receive any more copies of VECTOR.

Better still, you can take advantage of our special free membership offer (see VECTOR Vol 2, No 3 page 9). Send in your own renewal form with application forms and payment from three people who have not previously been Association members, and you get a free year’s membership if you are a U.K. private member, or a £10 reduction on your subscription otherwise.