Most talks on APL at FunctionalConf have focused on the way array oriented programming allows you to quickly deliver concise and efficient solutions to problems with an analytical core. This talk will focus on the development environment, and follow the life of an APL code snippet from it's interactive discovery, via testing and debugging, through to delivery as a web service and a shared object, embedded into a solution implemented in Python.

Dyalog is a modern, array-first, multi-paradigm programming language, which supports functional, object-oriented and imperative programming based on an APL language kernel. During the morning and early afternoon, we will explore the fundamentals of functional programming in APL. At the end of the day, Dyalog CXO Morten Kromberg will round off with an application development session, showing how a simple application with a HTML5/JS front-end and a RESTful web service can be used to deliver the power of APL to end users, or as embeddable components for other application tools. The "hands on" sections of the workshop can be followed under Mac OS X, Linux, or Microsoft Windows.

"vecdb" is a simple but powerful columnar database system implemented as a thin layer of open-source code which wraps memory-mapped arrays in Dyalog APL. It supports parallel queries on sharded databases, and is designed to support high-performance analytics on large datasets. It can be embedded in applications written in Dyalog APL, or called as a web service.

Since the original APL\360 interpreter saw the light of day in 1966, a large part of the of primitive functions in APL (A Programming Language) implicitly map operations to all elements of array arguments (and arrays of numbers or characters are the only “types” available in the language). Over the decades, the parallelism at the core of the notation has been extended, to nested arrays in the 80’s and arrays of objects in the 00’s. In this decade, arrays of futures have been added to provide users of APL with the ability to express asynchronous – but deterministic -algorithms.

This talk will introduce the most important parallel constructs available in current Dyalog APL, which (despite the name) essentially remains an executable mathematical notation.

Dyalog is an array first multi-paradigm language based on an APL language kernel. In APL, it is common for the application of primitive functions to arrays of conforming shape to imply a map; the function is applied item-wise to corresponding elements of the arguments, producing a result of the same shape. APL also provides a variety of explicit operators that provide different mappings of user-defined functions, or more generally functional compositions, to multi-dimensional and nested arrays.

One might expect that such language features would provide a complete framework for parallel programming. In practice, writing programs that can be efficiently executed in parallel on current hardware is extremely difficult, if implicit or explicit maps are the only parallel language feature available and an interpreter or compiler needs to deduce where to introduce the asynchronicity that is required in order to take advantage of the hardware.

This talk will present Futures and Isolates, and related parallel operators constructed upon them, which were added to Dyalog version 14.0 in 2014. The goal has been to provide explicit forms of deterministic asynchronous execution, designed to be very familiar to APL users, and continue to allow them to view the language as an executable mathematical notation, while taking advantage of parallel hardware that is now readily available.

Dyalog is a modern, array-first, multi-paradigm programming language, which supports functional, object-oriented and imperative programming based on an APL language kernel. During the morning and early afternoon, Dyalog's functional language guru John Scholes will introduce the fundamentals of functional programming in APL. At the end of the day, Dyalog CTO Morten Kromberg will round off with an application development session, showing how a simple web application with a HTML5/JS front-end and a RESTful web service can be used to deliver the power of APL to end users, or as embeddable components for other application tools. The "hands on" sections of the workshop can be followed under Mac OS X, Linux, or Microsoft Windows.

APL is a member of the family of languages that are approaching middle age (Ken Iverson’s book titled “A Programming Language” was published in 1962). APL was very influential in the 60’s and 70’s, and widely used to deliver “end user computing” - but although the REPL, dynamic scope and lack of a type system endeared APL to domain experts, it also drew fire from computer scientists, most famously when Edsger Dijkstra declared that “APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past it creates a new generation of coding bums.”

Dyalog is a modern, array-first, multi-paradigm programming language, which supports functional, object-oriented and imperative programming based on an APL language kernel. Dyalog allows people with good ideas – from bright high school students to PhDs – to contribute directly to the software development process using a notation which fits comfortably with those used in their own domains. Subject matter experts can write prototypes or, with suitable training and/or support, highly efficient, parallel and robust code that can be embedded in high-performance production applications.