Brian Becker

Brian was introduced to APL at the age of 14 during his first year of high school in 1975 when he discovered that the “typewriter” that knew how to play various games was actually a terminal connected by an acoustic coupler to the University of Rochester’s York APL timesharing system. When not involved in his studies or extracurricular activities, Brian could be found in his high school’s Mathematics Lab tinkering with APL.

On graduating from high school, Brian received the New York State Data Processing Association Award of Excellence in recognition for his work with APL. He was twice recognised by ACM/SIGAPL for innovative APL development work – once for his work in putting the full text of the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations online, and once for his development of a high-performance APL-based full text search engine.

Brian’s APL career began at I.P.Sharp Associates in 1980 where, among other roles, he was one of the first instructors of Ken Iverson’s Introduction to APL course. Brian has worked for three APL language implementors – I.P. Sharp Associates, STSC Inc., and Dyalog Ltd. APL has afforded Brian the opportunity to work in a wide variety of domains, including financial planning, manufacturing control systems, automated voice and data network design, full-text legislative and regulatory applications, electronic medical records, and governance/risk/compliance applications. Since joining Dyalog Ltd, Brian has worked on many tools and frameworks including the Dyalog File System (DFS) and several web-enabling frameworks (HttpCommand, Jarvis, MiServer, DUI, and SAWS). Brian also provides consulting services, primarily to Dyalog Ltd’s USA-based customers.