APL BUG 14 Sep 2020: Paul Jackson, Tools for J
The APL Bay Area Users' Group will meet on the 14th of September to
hear Paul Jackson speak on his experience learning J.
Officers will be elected.
Monday, 14 September 2020, 10 a.m. PDT
Google Meet:
https://meet.google.com/aqw-njep-tsj
(Paul plans to start at least five minutes before 10 a.m.)
A “preview” of the talk is at https://plj541.github.io/Tools/ToolsForJ.html
Paul Jackson's Biography:
I learned APL in 1969 while working at Trinity University in San
Antonio, Texas. I taught it there and at Dallas County Community
College District for the first twelve years of my career. I then
joined I.P. Sharp Associates, where I developed features for their
mainframe APL. I then led the SAX development to provide some modern
APL functionality on a Unix platform. This effort required frequent
interactions with Ken Iverson regarding his APL Dictionary and
features he wanted for direct definition. I eventually led the APL
development group, before leaving IPSA and APL as the focus of my
career in 1993.
For the first decade of the 2000s I led the development group at
Dialog. Dialog is a company which generalized and formalized search
engine expressions, much like APL did for logical expressions. I
retired in 2009, and am enjoying the ability to work on what interests
me.
In 2010, my first post-retirement project was to build a compiled APL
in .Net. In 2013, I heard of Nick Nickolov who had no previous
experience with APL but was determined to write one in JavaScript. I
served as technical advisor and provided APL models for a few things
like dyadic transpose. Given his approach, some models are in the
code but appear as the usual primitive. My only coding contributions
in JavaScript are a session manager, a file system and a browser-based
way to design and execute field-based screens with APL functions
responding to events in those fields.
After 15 years using J as a broken key APL, I used the imposed
discipline of shelter in place orders to properly learn J. The result
has been quite entertaining.
--
Devon McCormick, CFA
Quantitative Consultant
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For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
