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The Dyalog Duck was created in 1989 when Pete Donnelly used a simple duck outline to demonstrate a graphics library for Dyalog’s first 32-bit version. Over time, the duck has beome a symbol of Dyalog, appearing in tutorials and being used to demonstrate new features like multi-threading and .NET. It quickly caught on, and rubber ducks were even handed out at early user meetings. More about The Dyalog Duck.

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It has been a year since Abs joined Dyalog Ltd, and we asked him to look back over his first twelve months and his experiences so far. “A whole year? The time has flown by! It has been an intense journey with a steep yet rewarding learning curve so far, but I can’t wait to … Read
It’s been a year since Aarush joined us, and we asked him to look back over his first twelve months. Aarush joined Dyalog Ltd after studying at VIT Vellore in India, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Forgoing his college placements in pursuit of working on the nitty-gritty of programming … Read
Karl had always imagined that he would spend his career in academia, as had many who know him. However, after becoming disenchanted with the whole university environment halfway through his Master’s degree, he sought a role outside academia and joined Dyalog Ltd. Although he’s only been here for a few months, he feels that he … Read
It’s now one year since Stefan joined Dyalog Ltd, and we asked him what he made of the experience so far. “I can’t believe how time flies. It feels like it was only yesterday I arrived at the Bramley office for the first time, to pick up my laptop and meet everyone.” Prior to joining … Read
This week marks one year since Jada joined Dyalog Ltd, and we asked her about her experiences thus far. “It’s truly been a whirlwind of a year. I don’t know where the time has gone! It’s been intense, but in the best way possible. I’ve been able to get a feel for everything that being … Read
Mike recently joined Dyalog Ltd, bringing his experience in web and digital design. Mike grew up in West London, and now lives by the sea in East Sussex. His background is in Recording Engineering, and he worked for a number of years as a front-of-house sound engineer and theatre stage manager. Having learnt the basics … Read
After graduating from the University of Portsmouth with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, Abs started investigating IT roles. He wanted something that provided a challenge, working for a team that was passionate about what they do, and in which he could contribute to that effort through the software and IT abilities that he has … Read
In pursuit of his dream to contribute to the development of a programming language professionally, Aarush started cold emailing companies that worked on them (there aren’t a lot, but a lot). One of the companies he contacted was Dyalog Ltd. Aarush initially joined us in January 2023 as a contractor, focusing on testing the primitives … Read
In his second presentation of the week, Brandon Wilson relayed some of his experiences as a relative newcomer to APL and Dyalog. Having heard that most users learn APL through an apprentice model in which they enter an organisation and are taught by already experienced users, he sought out further help to learn array programming … Read
We started Wednesday with an update to the co-dfns project by Aaron Hsu. Aaron is trying to make APL more accessible to more people for tackling more problems. He explained how version 4 focusses on good performance on GPUs and detailed error reporting – including a parser that can be used for static analysis of … Read
Tools Architect Brian Becker started today’s presentations with an overview of the tools provided by Dyalog Ltd. to help develop applications. He also explained the plans to improve documentation and tutorials and have more comprehensive testing, especially as our tools are supported across different platforms, architectures, and deployment scenarios. He then demonstrated use of HttpCommand to … Read
The weather improved today – the sunshine was a refreshing feeling as we awoke to a new day of forward-thinking presentations. As usual, we began with Gitte Christensen’s welcoming address in which she spoke of the exciting new growth happening at Dyalog Ltd. Five new employees have joined since we met in Portugal last year … Read
We have returned to the (very windy this time!) shores of Elsinore in Denmark for our annual user meeting, Dyalog ’23! Today saw the usual range workshops in which everybody could get involved learning the intricacies of a range of topics with the support of experts from Team Dyalog and friends. In the morning, users … Read
Stefan Kruger recently joined Dyalog Ltd from IBM, where he worked on distributed databases for many years. Stefan spent a long time at university doing research in signal processing; after that he worked in several start-ups that were closely tied to the academic world. Then, taking a step away from technology for a while, Stefan … Read
This week marks the first anniversary of Peter joining Dyalog Ltd. He is one of the newest additions to Team Dyalog and we couldn’t be more excited for his future here. We were able to pry him away from the interpreter to catch up with him and see what his time has been like so … Read
Jada moved to the United Kingdom in 2015 to pursue a degree in law with politics at the University of Manchester. On graduation she relocated to Reading in the south of England, where she took on various temporary positions in administration during the Covid-19 pandemic. Jada first heard about APL when her partner, Rich Park, … Read
Last Wednesday we hosted APL Seeds ’23, the third of our free online user meetings aimed at new and prospective users of APL. In attendance was a mix of new users and the APL-curious, as well as more experienced APLers answering questions and imparting wisdom in the chat and during the post-event meetup. Rich Park … Read
Peter joined Dyalog Ltd in mid-July 2022, shortly after finishing his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Aalborg University in Denmark. He didn’t originally plan to look for a job so soon, but when he saw that Dyalog Ltd had an opening involving three of his favorite things (C programming, interpreters, and APL) it was … Read
As is often the case these days, Silas found APL through online programming language discussions – both in various forums and through videos (Aaron Hsu’s Co-dfns and John Scholes’ Game of Life demonstatration in particular) – whilst attempting to understand the more esoteric ideas and their theoretical underpinnings provided by Scheme and other functional languages. … Read
Links to recordings from this day of the user meeting are at the bottom of this post. To begin the final day of the user meeting, Aaron Hsu presented some strategies and ways of thinking about processing data that come from text. While his specific focus is parsing APL code for the co-dfns compiler, he … Read
Links to recordings from this day of the user meeting are at the bottom of this post. The third day of presentations kicked off with Brian Becker running us through the gauntlet of setting up and deploying web services. Initial setup with Jarvis and Docker containers seems like an absolute breeze. However, the later stages … Read
Links to recordings from this day of the user meeting are at the bottom of this post. Automation, architecture and performance were throughlines of the second day of presentations. Lars Stampe Villadsen from SimCorp A/S provided some advice on how to write tests and gave a live demonstration of a small testing framework together with … Read
Links to recordings from this day of the user meeting are at the bottom of this post. We were welcomed to the 2nd day of the user meeting by managing director (CEO) Gitte Christensen. Everybody could appreciate the emotion and sentiment when she noted the distinct “APL Hum” apparent in the atmosphere at this year’s … Read
Arriving to meet the warm sea air is already a refreshing change as this year’s long, hot summer started to close in the weeks leading up to this year’s user meeting. Of course, for some with less far to travel, the warmth is a familiar comfort. As delegates arrived on Sunday night we were treated … Read
On Tuesday 29 March we hosted APL Seeds ’22, the second annual online event for new and prospective users of APL (although everyone was welcome). Once again we were delighted to see that the majority of registrants had little to no APL experience; it feels like we get the chance to offer that same sense … Read
On Friday 15 October, the SERV S&L was presented with The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service by the Lord Lieutenant of Surrey. Geoff Streeter was one of 20 volunteer SERV S&L members who attended. What Is SERV S&L? SERV S&L (Service by Emergency Rider Volunteers for Surrey and London) are a charity organisation, made up … Read
Karta joined Dyalog in April, and is yet to meet anybody in person although he’s been told that this is not necessarily a bad thing! After completing his doctoral degree in theoretical physics, Karta stumbled upon Dyalog and APL entirely by happenstance. Being often captivated by things that look unfamiliar to him, and having an … Read
Background Dyalog version 18.0 contained the largest number of optimised algorithms in the history of Dyalog APL. Unfortunately, since its release, we have found that our process for review and testing of optimisations was insufficient to cope with the quantity and nature of the optimisations. Many of the new algorithms had edge cases that escaped … Read
Last Wednesday we hosted APL Seeds ’21, an event for those just starting their APL journey. Although we knew we had a good programme with some exceptional presenters in place, we very quickly had to increase our Zoom webinar limit to accommodate the 287 people who registered to attend! We were surprised and excited by … Read
The story of how Rodrigo got his first internship at Dyalog is, in his opinion, a textbook example of serendipity. As 2020 started, Rodrigo began actively participating in an online code golf community, where people try to solve programming challenges in as few bytes of code as possible. Whilst his golfing skills were possibly lacking, … Read
Shuhao joined Dyalog straight after he completed his Master’s degree in quantum computing, which happened to be during the second COVID-related lockdown in the UK. This has given him a quite unusual experience of starting a career as he has yet to meet a single member of the Dyalog team face to face! Shuhao obtained … Read
We received some excellent competition entries this year. Once again, thank you to all those who participated, congratulations to this year’s winners, and thank you to the Grand Prize Winner Andrii Makukha for his presentation at this year’s user meeting. This post contains some suggested Phase I solutions along with some comments from the judges. … Read
Ron Murray is a recent addition to the Dyalog team, with a long history in the APL community. He first encountered APL/360 in 1969 and was hooked. He used it as the basis for teaching Computer Science courses for the Hampton, Virginia High Schools. Then, working with other APL pioneers, he wrote several APL applications … Read
Stine graduated from Copenhagen Business School with a Masters degree in Business Administration and Information Management in 2016, and went to work for a small consultancy firm. She started with “Drag&Drop” programming in SSIS and other similar tools, but quickly moved into project management, accounting, and Business Intelligence. Covid-19 intervened just as she was looking … Read
Dyalog Pictures Ltd? After a wonderful banquet dinner bonding with fellow teammates of last night’s Viking Challenge, we were invited to the Jorns Auditorium for the world premiere of our movies from earlier in the day. The screening and awards show was a roaring success with everybody being surprised and thrilled at the quality of … Read
Floaty balls In contrast with Monday night’s brain-bending puzzles, last night there was some lighter entertainment as Richard Park presented his molecular dynamics framework APLPhys. He showed us how elegantly APL could express mathematical equations and we joined in his fascination watching simulations of little balls flying around on his MiServer based graphical interface. APL … Read
2⍴⊂’APL’ Last night Roberto Minervini and his students Pietro Pio Palumbo, Gabriele Meroni and Alessandro Laselli of Liceo Scientifico GB Grassi Saronno conducted A Puzzle League – sneakily introducing us to another APL. The delegates were divided into teams who competed to solve 18 maths and logic puzzles, which could be solved both using APL … Read
Dyalog ’19 talks begin As usual, we began the series of User Meeting talks with a warm welcome from Managing Director Gitte Christensen. This year Gitte’s message felt somewhat spiritual as she described the lore of Thor’s hammer Mjölnir and its place in formal ceremonies. The choice of logo for this year’s User Meeting feels … Read
Welcome back This year once again the Dyalog User Meeting returns to beautiful Elsinore in Denmark. The historic seaside city is home to Kronborg castle, famously immortalised in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – and Kromberg castle, where Morten lives. We are holding the user meeting at Konventum in the western outskirts of Elsinore. It features winding corridors … Read
Josh David is a recent graduate from the University of Scranton with a degree in Computer Science. He minored in Philosophy at college and headed The Philosophy Society, so feel free to strike up a philosophical discussion with him at any time! He is no stranger to APL. In Scranton, he was introduced to APL … Read
Based in Denver, Colorado, Nathan Rogers is a new member of the Dyalog team. In previous lives, Nathan spent six years as a member of the United States Armed Services as a Satellite Communications Operator, studied music theory and performance at the University of Northern Colorado, and built desktop and web applications across numerous languages … Read
Richard Park is the latest addition to the Dyalog team and is based at Dyalog HQ in the UK. Richard has been living in the same house in Bramley his entire life and recently returned to the village after one successful degree in physics at the University of Manchester, and one unsuccessful degree in education … Read
It has been almost 2 years since our last post about Jo Fergus (daughter of our Customer Account Manager, Karen Shaw) the pool player who Dyalog have sponsored in the past. When we last updated you, Jo had just had her daughter, Remy, and made the difficult decision to take some time out from pool … Read
Marshall joined Dyalog Ltd as a programming language implementor at the beginning of February 2017. He joins Dyalog with a wide variety in programming skills and languages such as J, C/C++, Javascript, x86, Python, Java, Haskell, Scala, MATLAB and Factor. Marshall has been involved in J programming and J’s implementation prior to joining Dyalog, and … Read
This year we have brought Michael Baas on board to provide local support for our German resellers and represent Dyalog more directly in the German market. Michael is an experienced APL developer who will be able to provide APL consultancy in German. He will also work as a member of the APL Tools Team internally within Dyalog. … Read
A personal account by John Scholes As a relatively new arrival to Dyalog, I have been working with Geoff for only 35 of his 40 years in the company, although we met earlier when we both worked for Atkins Computing in the early 1970s. Our in-depth collaboration started in the autumn of 1981, when we got together … Read
You may have been wondering what has been happening with Jo Shaw (daughter of our Customer Account Manager, Karen) the England pool player who Dyalog have sponsored in the past, so we thought it was time for an update. After getting a new job in December 2014, Jo moved from Hampshire to Wiltshire and joined … Read
Today was the last day of the user meeting, a further half-day celebrating 50 years of APL, with presentations both looking back at the history of APL from its beginnings to the present day, and looking forward to the future and how it can reach new audiences. In that vein, Roberto Minervini, a teacher from … Read
The Kenneth E. Iverson Award for Outstanding Contribution to APL is bestowed at the discretion of the Special Interest Group on APL of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGAPL) to people who have had a profound and positive impact on the development of APL and its community. Since 1983, the Iverson Award has been presented 19 times and … Read
Today we started to celebrate APL’s 50 year history, looking at how it has developed since IBM created the first clear workspace on 27 November 1966, and how it will continue to develop in the future. There was audience participation – prior to lunch, everyone joined in a rendition of APL Blossom Time. Behind the scenes the day … Read
Last night’s whisky and chocolate tasting Last night’s dinner ended with a talk from Glengoyne, a highland distillery based fourteen miles north of Glasgow. We were presented with three different whiskies in their range, and a talk explaining how they were produced and how that gave them their different flavours. They were served with single origin chocolate … Read
This year at the user meeting we have 106 attendees and a further 15 partners and guests, from 15 different countries worldwide. Today was the first day of presentations and the day the user meeting opened formally. Today also saw the arrival of the motion platform for the Viking challenge tomorrow and that’s been causing a lot of interest … Read
It was a gloriously sunny day in Glasgow today. The Golden Jubilee Hotel overlooks the River Clyde and this was the view at sunrise: The day began with delegate registration, with Karen and Fiona manning the registration desk throughout the day. To mark Dyalog at 50, Geoff also presented a desk loaded with memorabilia from the … Read
Welcome to Glasgow and to Dyalog ’16 – this year’s annual Dyalog user meeting, which is taking place at the Golden Jubilee Hotel on the banks of the River Clyde. Whether you are attending in Glasgow or following from afar, we hope to give you a taste of what is going on from the perspective … Read
May we introduce Adám Brudzewsky – the newest member of the Dyalog Tools Group Adám grew up in multiple countries and speaks multiple languages, and he has a slightly unusual background for coming into the APL world. His father was a really good APLer and brought him up in the conviction that APL is by … Read
Unfortunately, our colleagues at MicroAPL have decided to withdraw from the APL market, essentially due to the end of life of components they are using to deliver a cross-platform IDE and GUI applications. MicroAPL Ltd. continues to exist but has decided to focus on their highly successful porting tool business (customers include Dyalog Ltd). The … Read
At Dyalog we have been wondering for some time about a recurring spark of applications for educational licences from Africa. In this article we speak to Professor Michel Godron, who has been using APL for 20 years for statistical processing of databases holding various ecological measurements. He has now developed an application in Dyalog APL … Read
As Jay Foad assumes the role as CTO of Dyalog, Morten Kromberg moves into the newly created role of CXO. You might think that the X in CXO is like the common mathematical notation for the unknown, indicating that Morten has not yet figured out what to do next – but (at least if you … Read
Jay started as a Software Developer with Dyalog on 26 April 2010. When he joined the company he brought in-depth experience, having worked with software development for many years, mostly working with the deployment of C and C++ games on mobile handsets, with just-in-time translation to native code on the device. He also implemented a … Read
MiServer UI Controls Dan Baronet and Adám Brudzewsky continued yesterday’s presentation by Morten Kromberg on Cross-platform User Interfaces by demonstrating a lot of varied interface elements that are available when creating front-ends in MiServer. Especially encouraging were the special controls designed by Dyalog. These make it possible to have arrays render as complete super-elements (e.g. a table). No need to worry about the many underlying HTML … Read
Blog post from presentation by Stephen M Mansour PhD, The Carlisle Group as well as the University of Scranton,  and Jerry Brennan PhD, A former teacher of Statistics in Hawaii, who has now moved being a fulltime Psycologist. By Vibeke Ulmann #Dyalog15 Last year I managed to squeeze in a mention of TamStat in a blog … Read
Blog post from Aaron Hsu’s (Indiana University, USA) presentation Wednesday 9th September. By Vibeke Ulmann #Dyalog15 For the past 2-3 years Aaron and Dyalog have been collaborating on creating a new compiler. This is an Open Source project and the compiler – which is currently in ‘Version 0.5’, is available as a zip download from … Read
Blog post from Arianna Locatelli’s presentation on how she won the Dyalog APL programming contest 2015. By Vibeke Ulmann #Dyalog15 Introduction Now it it’s 7th year, the annual Dyalog APL Programming Contest continues to attract a lot of interest. One of our favourite sessions at the Annual User Meeting, is when we get the opportunity to meet the … Read
We have been spoilt with a large number of User presentations today, and although I have focused on writing more indepth about How to Save an Italian School with APL in a separate blog, I find it important to also give our blog readers a glimpse of  what we also saw and heard today. By Vibeke Ulmann #Dyalog15 We … Read
There is so much going on at Dyalog ’15. The general theme of the day was set with Morten Kromberg’s Technical Road Map. Dyalog is constantly refining and expanding APL’s capabilities and ease of use, quickly adding functionality to tie into new technologies, and adapting to emerging trends. Here are some highlights from the day: … Read
Blog post from presentation by Roberto Minervini with 4 of his students; Arianna Greco, Samuele Luigi Di Gioia, Kariman Admed and Silvana Maria Belén Colman Cabrera – all from Liceo Classico S.M. Legnani, a Public Secondary School. By Vibeke Ulmann #Dyalog15 Getting the message of the power of Dyalog APL to young people, is one we … Read
Blog post from Presentation by Gianfranco Alongi from Ericsson AB By Vibeke Ulmann #Dyalog15 Those of you who have been following my blog posts from Dyalog User meetings the past couple of years, will know that I am a always alert when we take a departure from talking about ‘coding’ or ‘technology solutions’, and ‘target achievement in … Read
Blog post from presentation by Dr. Markos Mitsos – Deutsche Krankenversicherung AG DKV – ERGO, Actuarial Department @ Dyalog ’15. by Vibeke Ulmann DKV has many million health insurance contracts. Each tariff of each contract has to be checked and possibly adjusted annually in terms of insurance premium based on a number of criteria – without … Read
Morten Kromberg went right to it with his well-prepared workshop on the prototype features that were introduced in version 14.0 of Dyalog APL. The features are still partly modelled in APL to allow the first wave of users to pass judgement on the design. Throughout the workshop, we were asked for feedback, to ensure that … Read
One of Sunday’s tracks was Brian Becker’s engaging workshop on MiServer 3.0 – the newest version of Dyalog’s APL-based web application framework that allows you to develop a cross platform application for stand-alone use or delivery via the web. The motto of MiServer is that everyone who can develop an APL application should also be able to make … Read
We’re here, we’re excited and Naxos greeted us with sweltering temperatures and beautiful sunshine on Saturday. Being the oldest Greek settlement in Sicily, founded before Syracuse, around 735 BC, Naxos has a lot to offer. The Atahotel Naxos venue, where the user meeting is taking place, is situated right on the coast with a fantastic view … Read
This is the last day of Dyalog ’14 so this is the last of six daily postcards from Eastbourne – we hope you have enjoyed getting a flavour of things as they happened. We expect there will be more discussion to come once we’re back and rested! Last Night’s Banquet Yesterday culminated in the traditional … Read

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Technical advice and assistance on all aspects of Dyalog usage is available by e-mail (support@dyalog.com) and/or telephone (+44 1256 830030 – limited to U.K. office hours). Limited advice on design and coding is available, but is not intended to replace the use of the printed and on-line documentation. Except when reporting an issue with the software, users are encouraged to seek advice from the user community via the Dyalog Forum (reading the content of the forums does not require membership).

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