Guest editorial: Plus ca change ...

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

Having taken a break from writing VECTOR editorials, I was very pleased to find out that I had not disappeared completely from the records of the BAA (only from the membership and mailing lists!) and to be asked to put finger to keyboard yet again.

Standing back from the internals of Committee membership (and also being relieved of the corresponding responsibilities) gives me a better opportunity to consider how the APL community is faring as we move towards the 1990s and to review the past four "VECTOR years".

The original VECTOR working party saw itself as a major component of a two-fold strategy. One target was to improve communications, expertise and standards within the global APL family; the other was to promote an awareness of APL and its strengths to a much wider community.

Five years later, a brief perusal of recent copies of VECTOR shows that whatever progress has been made on the internal objectives, progress on raising APL's profile in the outside world has been negligible.

"... we are spending over 90% of our efforts providing services to members and almost none on persuading non-APLers to try using APL." - Anthony Camacho, VECTOR 4.1

"What we have not yet done is to carry the disease to those not already infected." - Adrian Smith, VECTOR 4.2

"I too am concerned about the thin appreciation of APL." - Richard L Connor, VECTOR 4.2

"In the whole of my professional data processing career I have never come across a community so dedicated to contemplating its own navel." - Barrie Webster, VECTOR 4.2

"no whisper of APL was heard" - At the 1985 symposium of the International Council for Mathematical Instruction on the influence of computer in Mathematics and its teaching, Norman Thompson, VECTOR 4.3

"APLers seem to expect everyone else in the computer world to share their enthusiasm for the aesthetic qualities of the language; in the real world people just want to see results, or to have effective and straightforward end-user tools made available to them" - Mark Cranny, VECTOR 5.1

To overcome this problem we have to establish APL's credibility by demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing real problems. There are three essential steps in such an exercise.

First APL has to be used effectively. We all know of the successes within our own organisations, and events like the APLications conference at Canterbury last year spread the gospel to other APLers. If we cannot establish that APL is providing effective solutions, then we might as well give up now.

Second, we have to persuade developers to publicise their successes and mention APL's contribution. This can be harder and may face several obstacles:

• secrecy, especially if the development is giving a company a significant competitive advantage; this means that the best developments are often kept under wraps;
• lack of time, needed to stand back and describe what has been achieved; many employers will be reluctant to commit resources to such activity;
• lack of writing skills, needed to describe the benefits of the project giving an appropriately short but incisive comment on why APL provided the best approach;
• defensiveness; this can be a fundamental drawback for many people who have used APL to develop a successful commercial system; for the users of the system, the fact that APL was used is normally irrelevant; for their DP advisers it merely serves to raise eye-brows; the developer wants to publicise his product, but not necessarily its use of APL.

Third, we have to ensure that the material that is produced gets to the right people outside the APL community. We have to think less about how it boosts our own collective ego, and more about what other parties get out of it. If we want an article in the computer press we have to make it newsworthy, topical and of general interest. If we want to persuade colleges to include APL in their courses, we must show them employers looking for APL expertise. If we want APL to be used in schools, we must provide a cheap interpreter that works on their computer and provide the back-up material to help the teacher. If we want system developers to use APL as a tool, we must be able to point to an active job market in APL programmers, a high reputation amongst prospective users and their advisers, and future guaranteed compatibility with the next generations of hardware and operating system.

APL's future will be determined to a large extent by the personal preferences and prejudices of the people who choose to make a career in system development. The computing techniques of the next decade are being decided in colleges now; the techniques of the next century are being shaped in the schools. In neither of these areas is APL being used significantly. Over the past four years our company has trained fourteen graduates in APL; all of them had some experience of computing - at home, at school or at college; we have yet to recruit any graduate who already knows APL.

Some actions are being taken to address this problem, notably the I-APL initiative, but the BAA should also be doing much more. The following are some suggestions; I am sure that other readers will be able to provide other, doubtless better, ideas.

There should be an APL careers profile, circulated not only to all university and college careers offices, but also to all mathematics and engineering departments and to all lecturers in the computing departments; this should list the major companies using APL, with details of career opportunities and contact points. (Incidentally this could probably be made profitable, but this is definitely not the aim.)

The BAA should sponsor well produced case-studies, some for publication in the computer press, others for use in the academic community. Each case-study must be carefully targeted so that its message is relevant to its specific audience. In this context it is notable that VECTOR started off with a case-study in each issue; the stream has dried up and in total VECTOR has covered only six case-studies, the last nearly three years ago.

Competitions should be promoted at three levels: the best school project undertaken with APL; the most innovative use of APL at university or college; and the best case-study from a business application.

The tragedy is that the BAA has for some years been able to afford to do something about this. Five years ago we were broke; after APL86 we had accumulated a war-chest of £58,000 and this is continuing to grow - up to £70,000 in 1987/88. If we can't find a good way to spend this money, we should give it back to the members - but please let me back onto the membership list first!

Dates for Future Issues of VECTOR¶