Hello everyone!
Back to England after an amazing week at the Dyalog’12 conference.
First of all, I would like to thank everyone at the Dyalog conference who made us feel very welcome into the APL community.
My reflections about the conference:
It was my first conference and I loved it. In my opinion the conference itself was very well planned.
I liked all the presentations however it was very hard to follow some of them. I must say, the presentations I enjoyed the most were: “Introducing Dyalog Version 13.2 by: John Daintree”, because I’m really looking forward to this new version as I like updates; “Potential Version 14 by: John Scholes and Roger Hui”, because once again I like updates and I like to look forward to improvements and new features; “Optimisation across networks by: Paul Grosvenor” because it’s related to the company that I’m working for (Optima Systems); “Building an Android Application by: Illse Nell and Danie Mare” because me as a Young Adult think that phones are very important and I like new technology ; and “APL & Raspberry Pi by:Liam Flanagan” because again I love new technology and also it’s good to the growth of APL and also I think that the Ipad app was very good and interesting, and of course ” “Three Blind Mice by: us”! Equally I would like to make a special reference to John Scholes for the fantastic presentation he made about “State-Free Programming”.
Well done to everyone who made a presentation though.
Furthermore I would like to make a reference to the Hotel, because the food was completely amazing. The best I have ever had. Top Munch !
Overall my experience of the Dyalog’12 Conference was fabulous and hopefully next year I can go again.
Special Thank you to Optima Systems (Paul Grosvenor) for taking us to the Conference.
Shaquil Sidiki
Koventum Hotel, where the Dyalog’12 was held.
Three Blind Mice 
In the E-mail msg you sent to all delegates you request suggestions for things to do to improve your skills with APL. Well, you being dogs for new technology, and with MiServer at hand, how about a web server that at least in theory could host your blog? You would have to implement some kind of system to manage the content etc.
Hi. We appreciate your ideas/suggestions. Well, that’s not an easy task… I think we will need some time untill we are able to do that, but once we have an idea on how to go about it we will contact you.
Thanks
Thanks for the suggestion Klaus. As it happens the idea of the blog was only created the evening before our presentation at Dyalog. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until directly after our talk that I thought of the idea of hosting the site via MiServer. Nevertheless this is something we hope to implement in the future and possibly use as a showcase for APL on the web. Whether or not we will be able to do this is another discussion altogether, but hopefully we will learn a lot in the process.
Another, less laborious suggestion could be to implement arithmetic with large numbers. In modern encryption there’s a need for at least multiplying large primes. These numbers are so big that they cannot be represented in any normal types. Some alternative representation is required, e.g. vectors of char digits. How about implementing addition/subtraction/multiplication/division of this kind of numbers?
In your e-mail you asked for ideas and suggestions on how you can improve in APL.
• Read the paper Programming Style in APL by Ken Iverson. The ideas remain as valid today as they were in 1978 when the paper was written. If you find the paper helpful you can read some of the other papers in http://www.jsoftware.com/papers .
• Look at http://dfns.dyalog.com/ . Study both the code and the descriptive text.
• APL Quotations and Anecdotes give you a sense of what APL people are like.
Hi Roger. We will do.
Thanks for helping us.
Thanks for the links Roger! Unfortunately I have fallen sick upon arriving back in the UK (probably something to do with the terrible weather) But i will give them a look as soon as possible! Ive also heard looking at the code in SALT is a good way of learning 😉