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1990 Outstanding Achievement Award

from David Eastwood

Vector 7:2, page 9

APL community applications

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 9

Background

Each year the British APL Association makes an award for what is, in the committee's estimation, an Outstanding Achievement within the APL community. The terms which govern the award are fairly loose and the Committee are looking for achievements which assist the overall objectives of the BAPLA - be they technical achievements in APL; APL interpreter design; services to the APL community; favourable publicity for APL and so on. The previous Awards have been to John Scholes for his work on the Dyalog APL interpreter and to British Airways for their in-house APL MIS systems.

The 1990 Award

This year, the Awards subcommittee was faced with the widest choice that has been presented to them in the three years since the award was instituted. After much consideration, and a number of visits to some of the contenders, the subcommittee decided unanimously to make the award to Metapraxis for the Resolve package.

Metapraxis, based in Kingston Surrey, was founded in 1984 to supply Executive Information Systems and supporting consultancy services.

In its first 6 years of existence, Metapraxis has been highly successful - with over a hundred major corporate and governmental clients around the world. A subsidiary company was established in the USA in 1988.

A major element of Metapraxis' success has been the Resolve software package. Resolve is one of the leading Executive Information Systems currently commercially available and has been widely acclaimed in numerous review articles in the computer and general press. In 1989 Resolve won a British Design Award.

Resolve is designed for operation on PCs and is written in APL*PLUS/PC.

The Outstanding Achievement Award subcommittee felt that Resolve merited the 1990 award on the following grounds:

  1. Technical excellence of the product.
  2. Public recognition in the shape of the 1989 Design Award.
  3. Demonstration of the use of APL in the commercial packaged software environment.

Most APL programmers and users are well aware of the power of APL, but as a community APLers are rather inward looking. Opportunities to show that, given the right application, APL can hold its own with other programming languages are rarely taken. The Award subcommittee were firstly impressed with the quality of the work that Resolve embodies, but more importantly were pleased to note the Resolve had demonstrably met a real need in the market and had proved its worth against a number of non-APL rivals.