When Aaron Hsu was at Dyalog ’19 in Elsinore, he was preparing the defence of his PhD Thesis on A Data Parallel Compiler Hosted on the GPU. In his talk “Lessons for the Masses from the Trenches of Co-dfns” he looks back on some of the key lessons learned while working on the PhD and the Co-dfns compiler.
As usual, Aaron delivered a talk designed to make every one of us question the fundamental assumptions that we make about programming. Selected sound bites include:
Pointers are the refined sugar of programming.
Beauty and truth are intimately connected.
Value the human, command the machine!
To bring you back down to earth, (Uncle) Andy Shiers’ fifth Fireside Talk is about little things that Andy thinks are important to anyone managing or using a Dyalog APL installation that he suspects you have forgotten about, or may have missed when reading the documentation. Some of them are things that he overheard developers talking about and suspects are not documented at all! Most of them are things that he needed himself, or used to handle a support call. Serial numbers play an important role this year; the changes we have made so that we can support the use of unregistered versions of APL for testing and demonstration purposes make it important to understand the impact of serial numbers and how to manage them.
Join us again in week 9 to hear Richard Smith explain how to compute whether it will soon be Christmas and Roberto Minervini (and students) tell us about the Art of Teaching without Teaching.
This week’s videos:
U03: Lessons for the Masses from the Trenches of Co-dfns (Aaron Hsu, Indiana University)
D13: Uncle Andy’s Fireside Chat v5 (Andy Shiers)
