[7thaccount]

Thanks for taking the time to submit a lengthy reply Morten and I wish y'all the best of luck in 2020. I don't use APL/J/K professionally, but have played around with it for fun and found it to be quite enjoyable.

I keep up with Dyalog's twitter and conference videos, but wish there was a little more in the way of beginner material. The recent video on using the CSV/HTML/XML/JSON calls was great btw.

Two questions I have revolve around performance, numerical computing, and program distribution. To me, having to use Python + Numpy, Matlab, or low level languages for scientific and numerical computing is a shame as APL is basically math notation and should excel here. I hate wasting time writing loops (I parse lots and lots of text files) and how it makes my code harder to view and keep up with (APL fixes this). However, will Dyalog ever invest in writing some libraries or code snippets or primitives for things like sparse matrices and matrix factorizations that I probably don't want to implement myself and that make more sense to be done by the language implementers in C (I guess similar to how Dyalog has native support for JSON & CSV)? I'm guessing you can call out to BLAS/LAPACK (like J) or use Python or R's libraries via APL's bridge libraries, but that defeats most of the reason why I would want to use APL to begin with and I would end up with a franken-system and would be better off just using Python.

I guess what I'd like to see as a user is a way for me to write APL code in a tacit manner (I really like the organization of Aaron's compiler) and the compile it as a binary that could be shared with other users at work. It would be nice to have some built-in scientific primitives. Honestly though, the licensing is the real problem last I checked. It seems like running in production would be a non-starter, so I could only use as a single user tool (probably not worth the fight). I know this might be counter to how y'all currently make money, so I'm not exactly expecting a response on this note, but felt you should know what the few deal-breakers are from someone who has considered using it professionally but has shied away.

[arcfide]

I'll comment a bit here. If you look into prior research, there are a number of papers on sparse representations in APL along with accompanying code in the literature. That's a good starting point.

Additionally, sparse matrices are on the roadmap for Co-dfns in the future, so there's hope for you there. If you have a specific problem that you wish would work, the best thing to do is to make it known to us so that we can actually prioritize it. I think myself and Dyalog often prioritize those things for which we know there are users. If you want to be able to do this stuff, it would be great to get some concrete programs that we can work off of.

Finally, licensing should, IMO, be a non-issue for most people in the vast majority of cases. Dyalog provides some of the best licensing terms that I've seen, and there are already models that scale well both to startups and to existing deployment in large-scale commercial enterprise situations. If something in the licensing terms doesn't seem to work, I would get in touch with Sales @ Dyalog and they will surely be able to work with you to figure out something that would be equitable.

Most people are surprised when they find out how easy it is to move forward with Dyalog on a commercial product, or how readily Dyalog is looking at making things work for customers or people who wish they could be customers.