John was working on implementing negative right arguments to ⎕DL (the delay function in all APL implementations). As soon as that is sorted, we expect him to reappear.
John once did a live demo where a negative number (like ¯17.01) suddenly appeared in his APL session log. He looked puzzled for a moment, continued with his demo script for a little while, and arrived at the statement ⎕DL ¯17 (delay negative 17 seconds, and return the actual amount of time waited). He exclaimed "Oh, THAT's what that was!" and continued with his demo.
John had a fantastic sense of humour, if you have not seen them I recommend taking a little time off to watch some of the recordings at https://johnscholes.rip/video/
That is true, but OTOH I maintain that - in absolute terms - there are more difficult problems that people are struggling to solve using computers today than there were in 1970.
> most people vastly prefer easy and DWIM over simple and precise
Most people also vastly prefer not having to work on difficult problems. Iverson was clearly trying to provide a notation that would help the (admittedly smaller) group of people who find solving difficult problems interesting and valuable.
Thanks for your interest in the future of Dyalog! You are absolutely right that 2019 marks a kind of watershed moment for Dyalog. The original two-man development team who built version 1.0 of the interpreter (released in 1983) recently celebrated their 70th birthdays. At the beginning of this year, both of them had reduced working hours to about half time. Geoff Streeter remains in good health, but sadly John Scholes passed away in February.
Before Dyalog was acquired in 2005 and Gitte and I came in as CEO and CTO, the team working on Dyalog APL consisted of 5 people. Today that number is heading towards 25, several of whom were hired over the past decade to be ready to take over the work of Scholes and Streeter.
Gitte's comment about "not enough" young people signing up needs some context. The problem was actually caused by significantly increased interest in APL, which made us realise that our "classical" registration process was putting potential new users off. It was often taking too long to get people a copy of Dyalog APL because of the manual processing that was required, people were confused by the licensing terms and afraid of using the software – and many young people are just allergic to providing any information about themselves online. Now, APL is available for Windows, Linux (including the Pi) and macOS with no questions asked – for non-commercial use.
Losing Jay as CTO was a bit of a blow, but I think we are on the way to recovery. Now that he has completed his PhD on the subject of a parallelizing compiler (research that Dyalog has funded for the last 5 years), Aaron Hsu will join young guns Marshall Lochbaum and Adam Brudzewsky at Dyalog, and we have one more C developer joining the team in the UK in January. We hired two fresh APL consultants in the USA in 2019, and will be looking to hire two more in 2020 to support both existing and new business. I've been in the APL business for 40 years now, and my opinion is that the "kids" at Dyalog are every bit as impressive as Scholes and Streeter were at the same age; the shoes will be filled. There is as much young talent at Dyalog as there has ever been working on any APL interpreter, throughout the 50+ year history of the language.
As the team grows, we are able to afford having one or two team members focusing most of their efforts on performance. These efforts have accelerated over time, as first Nic Delcros, then Roger Hui and now Marshall have spent significant time rewriting primitive functions to take advantage of vector instructions and new hashing, sorting and other algorithms that have been evolved over the last four decades. Hardware has evolved in ways which mean that many of the old algorithms are sub-optimal on modern chips where the relative speed of CPU cycles vs memory access is completely different from the Z8000. Yes, Marshall is very good indeed, but I can't see a problem there . Performance has improved consistently in most of the last ten versions of Dyalog APL, and I hope we may see even more spectacular improvements in the next decade, both in the interpreter and in GPU-based parallel compilers.
We have much work to do: In addition to language and performance work, we expect Aaron to work with Richard Park, another new recruit who was added to the team last year, to work on training materials and documentation – and with Marshall, Roger and myself on quote evangelism unquote; talks at Lambdaconf, Functionalconf and perhaps some new conferences in 2020 and beyond (invitations welcome!).
For decades, Dyalog was a company that made a very comfortable living providing a better APL interpreter to clients who converted to Dyalog APL after initially purchasing an APL system from one of the companies that did serious marketing of APL interpreters: companies like IBM, STSC and I.P.Sharp Associates. Thanks to our recent growth, and the fact that Dyalog APL now has decent tooling not only under Microsoft Windows, but Linux and macOS too, we are now starting to focus on developing new business and attracting the next generation of APL developers.
I'm sorry to hear that we appear "directionless" to you. I will admit that it is an interesting challenge to keep existing customers satisfied (which should always remain the first priority for any organisation – put on your oxygen mask before helping others) while also working on attracting completely new groups of users. The rate of development of new language features, development tools and libraries for Dyalog APL is as high as it has been for any APL interpreter in history, at the same time as we are making significant performance improvements. Is there anything in particular that you miss?
Aaron's work on using APL as a high-performance tool for manipulating tree structures demonstrates that APL is more relevant than ever before, as a programming language that has a natural mechanical sympathy with modern hardware, and allows relatively unskilled developers to write extremely efficient solutions without using complex tricks. I recently had the pleasure of sharing a podium with Aaron in Mumbai as part of the JioTalks series, where we covered some of the reasons why APL is a tool worth taking a look at in 2020, even though the core of the language is more than 50 years old: https://jiotalks.com/watch/204/home/Morten_Kromberg_&_Aaron_...
APL has historically had relatively high market penetration in Scandinavia and Japan. Dyalog is a British company but for the last decade there has been significant Danish and Italian involvement in the form of major clients and the management team who engineered a "Management Buy In" together in 2005. Our headquarters and more than half the employees are in Basingstoke, UK. We have team members in Denmark (including the CEO and CXO), France, the USA and Canada. Since January, the CTO job is back in English hands.
It is mostly a question of inertia; we've been busy making sure that our customers have what they need, and continue to be willing and able to fund our R&D efforts, since 1983. We agree it is time to open things up a little, although FOSS remains impractical at this point in time. The free non-commercial (but "registered") release of v15.0 is the first step. Later this summer I hope we will make the un-registered version available on more platforms and probably a bit less annoying too / Morten Kromberg (CXO, Dyalog Ltd)
As of June 30th, when Dyalog v15.0 was released, Personal/Non-Commercial licenses are free of charge for 64-bit Windows, Linux and OS/X - and on the Raspberry Pi. We are in the process of streamlining the registration screen, please bear with us for a little while longer until it catches up.
John once did a live demo where a negative number (like ¯17.01) suddenly appeared in his APL session log. He looked puzzled for a moment, continued with his demo script for a little while, and arrived at the statement ⎕DL ¯17 (delay negative 17 seconds, and return the actual amount of time waited). He exclaimed "Oh, THAT's what that was!" and continued with his demo.
John had a fantastic sense of humour, if you have not seen them I recommend taking a little time off to watch some of the recordings at https://johnscholes.rip/video/