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by jodrellblank
2397 days ago
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But what’s the future of Dyalog? With the passing of John Scholes, then the CTO quitting to “work on his first love, compilers” while Dyalog talks of building compilers, then Gitte Christensen saying in a talk that one reason for changing the download terms is that there aren’t enough young people signing up, then after twenty or thirty years of development one person (Marshall) can go into the codebase and get enormous performance improvements.. I don’t at all mean this to be heckling from the peanut gallery, I have great respect for the people, the tools, the company; but from the distant outside there seems an air of slightly directionless faded grandeur, if you will, like looking at an old-timey cinema. If Dyalog APL is the future of APL, how do you imagine that future? |
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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_...
Thanks for asking!