The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 23

The health and progress of APL and of the British APL Association depend on achieving growth within education. From the other side of the picture the case which must be put before educationalists is that there is no language which can claim such strong educational merit in its own right as APL can.

Movement into education should be seen in the broader perspective of APL's niche-finding progress in the computing world at large. The following is an extract from a letter from a consultant written to the San Francisco Area APL Users Group:

"Market acceptance in the larger corporate settings (outside actuarial departments) has not been wonderful. Although there are companies with solid products which use APL as a base and which are continuing to grow, they are for the most part smaller operations."

Here is another quote from the same source, this time from a meeting report:

"APL provides limited access to machine specific functions. For all its power and utility, these two limitations mean that some things cannot be coded in APL, and others crawl."

Although these items appear to herald the demise or at least contraction of APL, arguably they point to an entirely healthy situation. When computers meant mainframe, performance scarcely mattered in choosing between languages. Now, however, that the small PC has become the most popular point of computer contact the difference between a fast system and a slow one really counts.

In the first flush of APL enthusiasm all fields of computer activity were game for the APL programmer. For APL, maturity consists of abandoning those fields in which its performance is worse or no better than other languages, and concentrating on those areas in which it is unsurpassed. PCs have hastened thereby the process of focussing APL on its regions of excellence. If C makes the screen image move faster, then let us use C to move the screen image.

The words in parentheses above are significant. Californian actuaries are clearly in no doubt about the excellence of APL on its own territory, and so too are (some) statisticians, numerical analysts, accountants, and others whose professional business is to handle numbers in the mass. The core of such applications demands that calculating power per statement is a more important consideration than performance. Now ask in what other field this is true. The answer of course is education, not just in the subjects listed above, although these score a double bonus, but education in a wide range of subjects, for which the computer only has value as a teaching aid if the calculating power per statement is high, and performance is a minor consideration. Absence of computer jargon too is important for teachers - in what systems other than APL can freedom be guaranteed from the profitless wrestle with system technicalities from which none but the brightest hackers are immune.

For teachers, it all adds up to APL, and I-APL gives an opportunity to add education to the list of professions which APL is best suited to serve. The other professions in this list have discovered it, at least in part, and many practitioners cannot afford to be without it - education is a larger field than any and now can afford to have it.

In the UK, there are plans to hold two courses this summer, one at King Alfred's College in Winchester which was last year's venue, and the other at University College, Swansea. In both cases, I-APL will be used and a copy of the interpreter given to participants. Instruction at Swansea will be on old IBM PCs, whereas at Winchester it will be on BBC micros. We expect therefore that the Winchester course will appeal predominantly to school teachers, and the Swansea one to teachers in higher education. In airline parlance, we have doubled the capacity on the route and we hope that the response will be that the traffic will also double!

Of course a leisure weekend is a precious commodity, and BAA members can help by persuading their teacher friends that such a sacrifice will be richly rewarded. The target is to have APL securely based at a selection of schools, universities and polytechnics, not primarily for mundane reasons of increasing employment prospects or qualifications, but because of its power through the computer to enhance understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of subjects to which it can naturally be applied.