The Bonfire of the Variables

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 108

APL 89 was a "steady as she goes" conference. No new or revolutionary products were announced, but it was heartening to see the major vendors pushing ahead on several fronts. Several new releases of existing interpreters are pending.

The conference theme was "APL as a Tool of Thought", borrowed from the title of a series of past conferences run by New York SIGAPL. Many papers illustrated the usage of APL as an effective medium for describing and expanding upon an idea or concept. The practical nature of APL also makes it "a tool for Measuring the Effectiveness of Thought".

The plenary sessions of the conference brought together speakers from various disciplines who have all pushed against and extended the known boundaries of their fields. They were not all APLers, but they have all used the essential ideas of APL in their search for simple yet powerful methods of specification and analysis.

The impact of Mathematica on the computing community will be interesting to monitor. Its author, Stephen Wolfram, acknowledges the parentage of APL in devising its functionality. However, its notation and "flavour" is more closely related to Lisp and Prolog. It uses only the standard symbols found on a keyboard. It is available for 386/DOS machines and the Apple Macintosh, and comes bundled free with the purchase of a NeXT computer. It will probably sell more copies in its first year than APL has ever sold.

The conference program was a good blend of the practical and the theoretical, with something for everyone. Presentations were generally more ambitious than in the past, and the necessary high-tech equipment usually worked well.

The refereeing of papers was questionable. Did the referees know in advance that their names wouldn't appear in the proceedings? Several papers were thinly disguised commercials for vendors, notably "APL in the Workstation Environment" (STSC). A workstation was defined as anything from a PC upwards, and the advertisement went on from there. Other papers did not acknowledge highly relevant work from recent conferences. This is not the author's fault, but that of the referees. SIGAPL is trying to rectify this in part through its Index of APL Articles.

The social side of the conference was, like the weather, hot and cold. The boat ride around New York Harbor was excellent. It was amazing how pretty Manhattan became after it got dark and you could only see the lights, not the architecture. The queue for dinner was a bit long, but the price was right. Thanks to the Danes for providing enough Carlsberg to lubricate the evening (and the next two evenings of private suite hospitality as well). The conference lunch, with musical entertainment by Stanley Jordan, was a real highlight. He uses APL to transform his musical score, using a simple notation. He played a tape of some of his pieces, and they were surprisingly tonal. His next jazz album will apparently acknowledge APL amongst the synthesizer credits.

The conference banquet was a mixture. The food was superb but its distribution was disorganized. I realise that the conference finances did not allow for the provision of any free drinks, but an announcement to that effect would have saved confusion and hoarseness. A.K.Dewdney's talk was entertaining and his Mandelbrot video was riveting. Afterwards, he was bombarded by people hoping to prove that anything Scientific American recreational writers can do, APLers can do better. We already know this, but does the world want to?

Conference handouts and freebies tend to reflect the character of the host city. Previous U.S. conferences have featured coffee mugs, Manchester gave us an umbrella and Sydney a T-shirt. Thus it was entirely appropriate that APL 89 delegates should receive a pocket knife, saw and screwdriver set - a personal defence mechanism suitable for late night subway rides. Readers of Tom Wolfe's famous novel of New York low-life certainly appreciated this data.

Overall, the conference was good value but the Hilton was expensive. It was ironic that the Hilton was put up for sale on the day after the conference. Are APLers improving at running conferences? On this evidence, the answer has to be "no". The American style of big inner-city hotel conventions just seems to be too inflexible, too expensive and too impersonal. The greatest minds in the APL community are not improving at getting their message across to a live audience. The lessons of past conferences are not being learned. Over to you, SIGAPL.

See you in Copenhagen!