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| Author |
Anyone need an APL programmer with 25 years experience
|
|
| MichaelHughes 2008-01-04, 3:58 am |
| Hi,
I'm based in the UK and I am looking for APL work. I have 25 years
experience of commercial APL systems with just about all dialects.
I am happy to work on site if in the UK or with a split with some
telecommuting if in Europe or the US.
Please contact me if you'd like a copy of my CV.
Thanks Michael
Michael@Hughes.uk.com
| |
|
| Michael, good luck with the search.
I've just been through the same quest and reached an inevitable
conclusion: no one is the UK recruits programmers whose language is
APL, on a permanent basis.
| |
|
| In article <d2d71017-283f-4c70-a757-2a7ee0bdad4c@m34g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
AAsk <AA2e72E@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
>Michael, good luck with the search.
>
>I've just been through the same quest and reached an inevitable
>conclusion: no one is the UK recruits programmers whose language is
>APL, on a permanent basis.
Though I've been contacted by some looking for K (and I'm rather far
away), so that market at least is fairly good.
Seth
| |
| Stephen Taylor 2008-01-05, 7:57 am |
| On Jan 4, 7:33 pm, se...@panix.com (Seth) wrote:
> In article <d2d71017-283f-4c70-a757-2a7ee0bda...@m34g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
>
> AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Though I've been contacted by some looking for K (and I'm rather far
> away), so that market at least is fairly good.
>
> Seth
Or find people with problems urgent enough they don't care what you
use. Brooke Allen has an excellent story about getting work at
http://www.internationalfamilymag.c...g07/stories.htm
I see the same job market Seth describes. I've reposted to this list
under the label 'Job Watch' the few advertisements I've seen for APL
programmers. Interest in K and Q seems to be growing, though it's
still a small community.
Scott Stevens at 33-6.com is a London recruiter who specialises in Kx
customers. In the past K and Q have been hard for outsiders to get
into, but it's easier now. Jeffry Borror's "Q for Mortals" is
thorough, and a lot easier for a reader who already knows APL. Your
recent years spent in a bulge-bracket bank ought to help too. Simon
Garland, Kx's CTO, is sympathetic to newbies and might be able to help
with a personal licence and access to the Kx technical site.
Stephen Taylor
editor@vector.org.uk
| |
|
| I am not convinced. They say "that if you are in a hole, stop
digging"; in the UK, there in no whole deeper than APL. As a hobby or
cult interest, APL is fine ... as a means of making a living (includes
sustaining a 25-year mortgage & a growing family) APL (any hybrid) is
a death wish ...
The story has changed too; people (employers) used to think APL is
simply a bad idea but now people (recruiters) simply have never heard
of APL. As far as I can tell, not even the vendors of APL employ
fulltime APL developers.
| |
| Jan Karman 2008-01-05, 7:57 am |
|
"MichaelHughes" <Michael@hughes.uk.com> wrote in message
news:517a7c5b-4fd8-4546-b246-065b3a5e6eaf@i12g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
>
> I'm based in the UK and I am looking for APL work. I have 25 years
> experience of commercial APL systems with just about all dialects.
>
[...]
25 years is too long; 6 might be better.
If you started at 18 you're 43 - in my country those people are and will stay on
the dole (btw I started offering my solutions at 46 and made a decent career in
the pension business, doing 14 years fulltime APL).
But, the good news: there're always people who are interested in other people
who are able to solve their problems and who can afford to pay for it, so,
depending on your profession, you might find an area of business, in or outside
the UK - this world grows smaller and smaller.
Is UK in the EU? Then you have a market of 400 mln. Think positively. What can
you offer, why should they hire you? Sometimes an agency can be of help.
If you are an expert in your field, read a book on how to start your own
consultancy (some Herbert ... from USA wrote an excellent book. He says: "Never
apply for a job anymore, stay free!"). Play hard to get, then they might say: we
don't want a consultant, we want an employee - there you go! Remember, there's a
lot of work to do.
Good luck!
| |
| Morten Kromberg 2008-01-06, 7:57 am |
| On Jan 5, 2:17=A0pm, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
> I am not convinced. They say "that if you are in a hole, stop
> digging"; in the UK, there in no whole deeper than APL. As a hobby or
> cult interest, APL is fine ... as a means of making a living (includes
> sustaining a 25-year mortgage & a growing family) APL (any hybrid) is
> a death wish ...
>
> The story has changed too; people (employers) used to think APL is
> simply a bad idea but now people (recruiters) simply have never heard
> of APL. As far as I can tell, not even the vendors of APL employ
> fulltime APL developers.
In reverse order: Your last statement is incorrect, at least with
respect to Dyalog. We have hired one person who I think of as a "full
time APL programmer" each of the last two years (one in the UK and one
in Canada). We have also paid for APL consultancy in the USA. About
25-30% of the Dyalog staff are currently people that I think of
primarily as "APL Programmers" (I include myself in this count). So
far, these people have mostly been involved in QA and documentation
work (and a wee bit of internal admin app development), but starting
this year it is our plan to write and publish a lot of new "sample
code", tutorials etc, and ramp up our "evangelism" programme :-). It
is NOT our intention to compete with people who do APL consultancy for
a living.
It may be true that APL is not the right way to sustain a 25-year
mortgage (starting today), but I do know several people who bought
houses and planes for cash as the end result of work they did in APL.
Looking for employment as "an APL programmer" in a large UK company IS
not easy in the current market. In the US and Europe there ARE large
companies who continuously employ new people to do work in APL.
However, they are usually either recruiting "domain experts" straight
out of school with current knowledge in fields like finance or some
form of engineering - and then training them in APL, or they are
looking for younger people who know "modern IT techniques": OO / SQL /
GUI, in order to build wrappers and bridges between domain experts and
IT infrastructure. Either way, you need to be able to offer more than
simply having many years of APL experience.
I believe that the reason why the k market currently has more openings
for "experienced APL hands", is that many k applications are "math
engines" with minimal interfaces (gulping ticker data and producing
analyses or generating orders), so pure array language experience is
more directly applicable in this marketplace. With APL, rather more of
the application tends to get written in APL so the need for cross-
domain expertise is more important.
While you wait for the "APL programmer" market to come back to life in
the UK, you can help seed a new market. As others have pointed out,
you need to find someone with a problem they need to have solved,
someone with a good idea, who needs help to turn it into a product.
You need to take the initiative. Finding someone with an interesting
problem is not easy but there are LOTS of these people and the rewards
can be substantial. Once you get going, YOU can hire some APL
programmers as your company grows.
Morten
| |
|
| APL is but one tool in the tool chest and a particularly good one.
However, the IT industry is either unaware of this or is aware of the
credentials of the language and all that comes with it (which makes it
unviable).
I have used APL just as a tool and incorporated other industry-
standard technologies such as ADO, Win32 APIs, Office automation,
custom class libraries etc in the applications I have built. For these
applications I have had to know the domain, UK pensions, in order to
get going.
I also use VB & .NET: for these, there is no 'cult' approach and
knowledge of any domain is not a pre-requisite. If I want a job
utilising these skills, I simply start off with any of a number of
recruitment resources such as www.jobserve.co.uk. Potentials employers
have standard yardsticks for establishing my coding skills and do not
require domain knowledge.
So, for APL I have to find out who has a problem to solve and
demonstrate to them that I can solve the problem using APL. How do I
do that? How do I convince them that an APL solution is sustainable?
The only way this is possible is via a personal network of contacts.
If you look at the Vector Products guide which lists a number of
organisations that use APL, not one of them is interested in
recruiting someone with APL skills (alone).
Even organisations (in the UK) that are known to use APL, e.g. COGNOS,
never recruit APL developers publicly.
Isn't it interesting that I can find a job with skills in VB 6.0 -
declared as a legacy product by its vendors, Microsoft as long as 6/7
yeara ago - and I get absolutely no where with skills in APL -
apparently the cutting edge tool of the 21st century!
APL seems to have some signs of life in the US and parts of Europe: in
the UK it is all but dead. I would be ecstatic if someone can
demonstrate that that is not so.
For instance, can you divulge how many copies of V11 you sold in the
UK in 2007? APL2000 do not even have a UK distributor!
| |
| Jan Karman 2008-01-06, 7:57 am |
|
"Morten Kromberg" <mkrom@dyalog.com> wrote in message
news:32f69bf5-89d8-4fbc-8f14-8a331e83833d@e23g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
On Jan 5, 2:17 pm, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
[...]
[color=darkred]
> You need to take the initiative. Finding someone with an interesting
> problem is not easy but there are LOTS of these people and the rewards
> can be substantial. Once you get going, YOU can hire some APL
> programmers as your company grows.
>
> Morten
Well said, Morten.
Just look at everyday tv pulp they're pooring upon us. Everyday you may notice a
massmarket, suitable for a decent APL solution: telecom, shop chains, insurance,
banking, health care, political parties, unions, medical laboratories (I have
concrete instances!) , who are obviously doing bad jobs - and don't forget crime
fighting: the police is in need for advanced technology in their search
departments, although they're not fully aware they're decades behind ...
So, be creative (not a hero, eh ...) - and ... read Tzwang Tze, esp. that on the
Great Burglar. Every 'great man' needs the characteristics of a great burglar:
needs to know where to find the loot (people in need for the right solution),
prepares to have the right tools (APL, K), has the guts to get in first (do the
marketing), has the perseverance to finish the job and get out last and finally
has the righteousness to fairly divide the profit. Without those records no
'great burglar' will exist, thus spoke Tzwang Tze.
| |
| Jan Karman 2008-01-06, 7:57 am |
| Also read Fred P. Brooks, Jr's The Mythical Man - Month: indispensible!
"Morten Kromberg" <mkrom@dyalog.com> wrote in message
news:32f69bf5-89d8-4fbc-8f14-8a331e83833d@e23g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
On Jan 5, 2:17 pm, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
> I am not convinced. They say "that if you are in a hole, stop
> digging"; in the UK, there in no whole deeper than APL. As a hobby or
> cult interest, APL is fine ... as a means of making a living (includes
> sustaining a 25-year mortgage & a growing family) APL (any hybrid) is
> a death wish ...
>
> The story has changed too; people (employers) used to think APL is
> simply a bad idea but now people (recruiters) simply have never heard
> of APL. As far as I can tell, not even the vendors of APL employ
> fulltime APL developers.
In reverse order: Your last statement is incorrect, at least with
respect to Dyalog. We have hired one person who I think of as a "full
time APL programmer" each of the last two years (one in the UK and one
in Canada). We have also paid for APL consultancy in the USA. About
25-30% of the Dyalog staff are currently people that I think of
primarily as "APL Programmers" (I include myself in this count). So
far, these people have mostly been involved in QA and documentation
work (and a wee bit of internal admin app development), but starting
this year it is our plan to write and publish a lot of new "sample
code", tutorials etc, and ramp up our "evangelism" programme :-). It
is NOT our intention to compete with people who do APL consultancy for
a living.
It may be true that APL is not the right way to sustain a 25-year
mortgage (starting today), but I do know several people who bought
houses and planes for cash as the end result of work they did in APL.
Looking for employment as "an APL programmer" in a large UK company IS
not easy in the current market. In the US and Europe there ARE large
companies who continuously employ new people to do work in APL.
However, they are usually either recruiting "domain experts" straight
out of school with current knowledge in fields like finance or some
form of engineering - and then training them in APL, or they are
looking for younger people who know "modern IT techniques": OO / SQL /
GUI, in order to build wrappers and bridges between domain experts and
IT infrastructure. Either way, you need to be able to offer more than
simply having many years of APL experience.
I believe that the reason why the k market currently has more openings
for "experienced APL hands", is that many k applications are "math
engines" with minimal interfaces (gulping ticker data and producing
analyses or generating orders), so pure array language experience is
more directly applicable in this marketplace. With APL, rather more of
the application tends to get written in APL so the need for cross-
domain expertise is more important.
While you wait for the "APL programmer" market to come back to life in
the UK, you can help seed a new market. As others have pointed out,
you need to find someone with a problem they need to have solved,
someone with a good idea, who needs help to turn it into a product.
You need to take the initiative. Finding someone with an interesting
problem is not easy but there are LOTS of these people and the rewards
can be substantial. Once you get going, YOU can hire some APL
programmers as your company grows.
Morten
| |
| Morten Kromberg 2008-01-06, 7:57 am |
| On Jan 6, 12:41=A0pm, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
> APL is but one tool in the tool chest and a particularly good one.
> However, the IT industry is either unaware of this or is aware of the
> credentials of the language and all that comes with it (which makes it
> unviable).
The main issue is that APL is most valuable in the hands of a kind of
person that most IT departments do not want to hire. They want to see
programming as an unskilled task which can be performance by
replaceable "cannon fodder", or outsourced to cheap labour markets.
Don't expect IT departments to learn to love APL. But do expect more
and more development to move out of the IT department as companies
lose faith in the ability of traditional methodologies to deliver non-
trivial solutions in real time.
> I also use VB & .NET: for these, there is no 'cult' approach and
> knowledge of any domain is not a pre-requisite. If I want a job
> utilising these skills, I simply start off with any of a number of
> recruitment resources such aswww.jobserve.co.uk. Potentials employers
> have standard yardsticks for establishing my coding skills and do not
> require domain knowledge.
Again, there is probably nothing we can do to make the same true for
APL. If you are not making use of insight into the problem you are
trying to solve, APL is unlikely to give you enough of a competitive
edge to make it worth using.
> So, for APL I have to find out who has a problem to solve and
> demonstrate to them that I can solve the problem using APL. How do I
> do that? How do I convince them that an APL solution is sustainable?
> The only way this is possible is via a personal network of contacts.
You need to find a way to locate people with interesting ideas and
possibly be in a position to do work that they initially don't have to
pay for, to demonstrate your capabilities. I doubt that arguing
sustainability is important in the early stages. Don't make it an
issue, it isn't.
> If you look at the Vector Products guide which lists a number of
> organisations that use APL, not one of them is interested in
> recruiting someone with APL skills (alone).
>
> Even organisations (in the UK) that are known to use APL, e.g. COGNOS,
> never recruit APL developers publicly.
I think we've been through that discussion. There are not a lot of
"APL programming" jobs being added in the UK. Also, if people want to
recruit APL developers they are unlikely to do so in public - more
likely to use the network, which is quite closely knit.
> Isn't it interesting that I can find a job with skills in VB 6.0 -
> declared as a legacy product by its vendors, Microsoft as long as 6/7
> yeara ago - and I get absolutely no where with skills in APL -
> apparently the cutting edge tool of the 21st century!
Perhaps, but I don't know what the conclusion is, other than than
Microsoft isn't doing a very good job of convincing people to move to
new prouducts :-).
> APL seems to have some signs of life in the US and parts of Europe: in
> the UK it is all but dead. I would be ecstatic if someone can
> demonstrate that that is not so.
Shouting out loud that you believe APL to be dead doesn't seem like
the first step on the way to building the network that I think you
need. Consider the impact is on people who MIGHT be thinking about
hiring you or others for an APL job, and happen to read this.
> For instance, can you divulge how many copies of V11 you sold in the
> UK in 2007? APL2000 do not even have a UK distributor!
I'll see if I can come up with this number, can't promise anything.
Also can't comment on APL2000's sales strategy, of course.
Morten
| |
| Ibeam2000 2008-01-06, 10:02 pm |
| Speaking from experience, I have been in an independent consultant in
(mostly) APL for over 20 years, and have known APL for over 30. I was
sold on APL the day my three page Fortran struggle turned into just
over 10 lines of code, plus the idea that I could now "plot" (crudely,
at the time, but still many blight years ahead the other blighters) my
data with nearly zero effort and an equivalent number of keystrokes.
I started my business in 1984. A good omen, it was. But with very
few exceptions, most of my work was "maintenance programming", and
there was some sort of new, improved, replacement system on the
horizon, to be written in whatever programming language was in fashion
or in mainstream at the time. Even in my previous life at the
timesharing company, APL usage was often very temporary, either the
inhouse computer was full up, or the client was prototyping something,
getting it in production on the mainframe while a team of Cobol slugs
were writing the real application.
And to be perfectly honest, as these were my clients, I did not ever
try to talk them out of it - "Resistance was useless", to paraphrase
one young Vogon. However, this gave me a wonderful opportunity to
learn some of the other stuff out there. With one client, I learned
PC-Express, with another, Smalltalk, and with yet another, Matlab.
Granted two out of three of these technologies are pushing up daisies,
I still made some money and learned something.
If you were to find an APL job today, it would most likely be in
conjunction with a migration to some other technology, most
likely .Net or Java. My suggestion is to learn this garbage, become
good at it, then concentrate on finding the .Net/Java jobs with or
without the APL migration. VB, C#, and Java are practically the same
(execrable) language. Spend some money on a couple of good books,
then download the stuff from the Hinternet. Download the various
Express Editions for VB, C#, C++, and even Java or J+ or whatever they
call it. Download Eclipse, get the latest version of Java from Sun,
find out what a Swing is or what Struts are. The technology is, well,
underwhelming, but it beats cleaning toilets. None of these will ever
beat APL for sheer expressive power, but at least you are in a vantage
point to see what's coming next.
Sadly, most APL migrations these days appear to be happening for the
wrong reasons. It doesn't look as if APL vendor stability is a
problem, rather it often happens for someone's personal glory or
business hobby ("I want to learn VB", spoken in George Carlin's voice)
or plain old corporate intrigue. It is rarely in the interest of the
application or users to do it, but it gets done. And, normally using
a magic wand, the migration is pronounced a success.
| |
| Ibeam2000 2008-01-06, 10:02 pm |
| PS:
Whenever possible, it was my career goal to always avoid mainstream
technologies such as Java, .Net, Cobol, and so on. Why? Because
there was always someone younger, better, and most importantly,
cheaper, who could take my place. Instead, I would become expert in
something which was less mainstream, stick with it, and see where it
took me. Other than not always being able to live wherever I wanted,
this strategy has always worked well for me. These days, with
computer technology diversity being a thing of the past, it's easier
to say this than to actually do it. Having said that, there is always
need for an expert, the point is to get yourself there.
One of my managers recently told me that everything that has ever
needed to be written has been written. The era of innovation is
over. From his vantage point, the job was to cram all applications
into some corporate-friendly computer language (in his case, Java). I
don't really believe this. Reading this inside out, the challenge is
to find something which needs to be written, along with the requisite
financial commitment and backing to get it done.
| |
|
| >Consider the impact is on people who MIGHT be thinking about hiring you or others for an APL job, and happen to read this.
So who or what is this network that hires APL developers 'silently'?
In my case, it is clear that
1. ability to use APL+Win, APL/W, APLX, VisualAPL out of the box, with
experience with (mainframe) APL2 stopping circa 1995
2. writing about APL in journals like Vector & Quote Quad
3. publishing a book
is not enough to gain access to this network.
Is conference attendance the passport to access the network?
I would be interested to learn of the number of new commercial
licences sold for V11 in 2007.
| |
| Ibeam2000 2008-01-06, 10:02 pm |
| More recently, I have been attending all of the APL conferences that
happen. When business goes bad, I will economise, i.e. cheaper hotel
or motel, cheap(er) transportation, cheaper or no rental car, etc.
But I will always do my best to go. I try to meet and talk to
everyone I can, whether there is the smell of $ or not. It's a bit
like going fishing = mostly you come back empty handed. But once in a
while, you might catch something big. But unlike going fishing,
someone you met five years ago might need you today.
| |
| Ibeam2000 2008-01-06, 10:02 pm |
| More recently, I have been attending all of the APL conferences that
happen. When business goes bad, I will economise, i.e. cheaper hotel
or motel, cheap(er) transportation, cheaper or no rental car, etc.
But I will always do my best to go. I try to meet and talk to
everyone I can, whether there is the smell of $ or not. It's a bit
like going fishing = mostly you come back empty handed. But once in a
while, you might catch something big. But unlike going fishing,
someone you met five years ago might need you today.
| |
| Ibeam2000 2008-01-06, 10:02 pm |
| More recently, I have been attending all of the APL conferences that
happen. When business goes bad, I will economise, i.e. cheaper hotel
or motel, cheap(er) transportation, cheaper or no rental car, etc.
But I will always do my best to go. I try to meet and talk to
everyone I can, whether there is the smell of $ or not. It's a bit
like going fishing = mostly you come back empty handed. But once in a
while, you might catch something big. But unlike going fishing,
someone you met five years ago might need you today.
| |
|
|
I guess that the Unicode APLs will let APL become more usable.
It is necessary to have a good connection to the Web as well.
As it is now I do not know of any easy way of using APL together with
the web.
I know there are some applications using the Web together withh APLs.
It is just not very easy to create such applications.
| |
| Stephen Taylor 2008-01-07, 6:58 pm |
| On Jan 6, 7:18 pm, Gosi <gos...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess that the Unicode APLs will let APL become more usable.
> It is necessary to have a good connection to the Web as well.
>
> As it is now I do not know of any easy way of using APL together with
> the web.
> I know there are some applications using the Web together withh APLs.
> It is just not very easy to create such applications.
Good point, and I think an important one. Yes, before Unicode, web-
page encoding for international sites was annoying enough without
adding a further mapping to and from APL internal representations.
Unicode unlocks two doors at once.
At Dyalog07 in Princeton I demonstrated a small bilingual (English and
Japanese) static website generated (apart from the image files)
entirely from a Dyalog 12 workspace. The APL code required was tiny
and (IMHO) lucid.
I've used various 'authoring' tools before: Microsoft FrontPage, PHP +
text editor, Joomla! CMS -- nothing measures up to the slickness of the
Dyalog IDE and generating everything out of a single workspace file.
I'm interested in similarly light and slick approaches to dynamic
sites. I've built one application using ASP.Net, and it seems to me
there is scope for something considerably lighter and more flexible. I
think the answer, if there is one, is going to be, as ever, staying
close to the language and avoiding cunning and elaborate frameworks,
even ones as admired as Rails. At any rate, I'm expecting an exciting
year for this work, and would be glad to hear from anyone working
along related lines.
SJT
| |
|
| On Jan 7, 2:15 pm, "Stephen Taylor <edi...@vector.org.uk>"
<StephenTaylorF...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 6, 7:18 pm, Gosi <gos...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Good point, and I think an important one. Yes, before Unicode, web-
> page encoding for international sites was annoying enough without
> adding a further mapping to and from APL internal representations.
> Unicode unlocks two doors at once.
>
> At Dyalog07 in Princeton I demonstrated a small bilingual (English and
> Japanese) static website generated (apart from the image files)
> entirely from a Dyalog 12 workspace. The APL code required was tiny
> and (IMHO) lucid.
>
> I've used various 'authoring' tools before: Microsoft FrontPage, PHP +
> text editor, Joomla! CMS -- nothing measures up to the slickness of the
> Dyalog IDE and generating everything out of a single workspace file.
>
> I'm interested in similarly light and slick approaches to dynamic
> sites. I've built one application using ASP.Net, and it seems to me
> there is scope for something considerably lighter and more flexible. I
> think the answer, if there is one, is going to be, as ever, staying
> close to the language and avoiding cunning and elaborate frameworks,
> even ones as admired as Rails. At any rate, I'm expecting an exciting
> year for this work, and would be glad to hear from anyone working
> along related lines.
>
> SJT
I think that it would be great to have some out of the box very simple
applications.
Applications that would do some really elementary stuff with grids.
Other sets of applications that would through up a web interface.
I am not talking about any big database servers.
Something that would demonstrate easy input/output from a screen.
Saving the results in a file.
Yet another to do communication directly between computers.
All of these kinds of applications are available but are doing a bit
too much and are not easy to set up.
I have wanted to see a lot of simplistic books written in the style of
"APL for Dummies"
I think quite a lot of people are simply scared of all the beautiful
advanced applications that are so "easy" to do in APL
| |
|
| Advanced browser-based applications tend to use subscribe/publish
technology these days: is this possible with APL?
| |
| Morten Kromberg 2008-01-07, 6:58 pm |
| On Jan 7, 9:07=A0pm, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
> Advanced browser-based applications tend to use subscribe/publish
> technology these days: is this possible with APL?
I'm confident that the answer is "Yes", but I haven't been able to
find out exactly what "subscribe/publish technology is".
:-)
I've searched the internet and found rather different-sounding
functionality described using this pair of buzzwords - can you be more
specific?
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|
| > I've searched the internet and found rather different-sounding functionality described using this pair of buzzwords -> can you be more specific?
I barely understand what this means so do not take what I say below as
gospel: here it goes.
With a client/server architecture, the server raises events to which
the client reacts. For example, the server can raise an event when
elements in an underlying database table has changed and the client
may then proceed to refresh what information it shows on say, a form.
To do this, the client refreshes 'everything' as it does not know what
has changed.
This approach is time-consuming and unviable for a browser-based
application as it needs to be much more responsive - the hour glass in
not a meaningful way of signalling a long process to the user.
With subscribe/publish, the publisher is like the server with an
important difference: the publisher does not know who the subscriber
is or indeed how many of them there are. The subscriber is like the
client only there may be several (or none). You might have a
subscriber that listens only for changes, say, and signals that
information to the application (GUI). Another example might be a
subscriber that listens for signals to launch another process e.g.
elements of an order may change that require parts of an invoice to be
rebuilt.
What client/server and subscribe/publish have in common is that the
client (subscriber) reacts to events (serially) raised by the server
(publisher); the important difference is that while the client/server
architecture is synchronous (and 1:1, usually), the subscribe/publish
architecture is not synchronous (and may be n:1, ie parallel).
Hope this makes some sense.
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| Morten Kromberg 2008-01-08, 6:59 pm |
| On Jan 7, 4:17 pm, Gosi <gos...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that it would be great to have some out of the box very simple
> applications.
> Applications that would do some really elementary stuff with grids.
> Other sets of applications that would through up a web interface.
> I am not talking about any big database servers.
> Something that would demonstrate easy input/output from a screen.
> Saving the results in a file.
> Yet another to do communication directly between computers.
>
> All of these kinds of applications are available but are doing a bit
> too much and are not easy to set up.
>
> I have wanted to see a lot of simplistic books written in the style of
> "APL for Dummies"
>
> I think quite a lot of people are simply scared of all the beautiful
> advanced applications that are so "easy" to do in APL
You are absolutely right.
Accessing the web is actually very easy from APL, but there are not
enough simple examples available. Writing these examples is a high
priority in 2008. As a first step on the way with respect to using the
web, the "Conga" workspace which will be included with Dyalog v12
contains very simple examples of a web server (about a page of APL), a
web client ("aka web screen scraper"), an FTP client (OK, this one is
several pages of code), "remote procedure calling" between APL
systems, a telnet server and client, and a couple of other simple
examples.
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| Morten Kromberg 2008-01-08, 6:59 pm |
| On Jan 8, 5:19=A0am, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
lity described using this pair of buzzwords -> can you be more specific?[color=darkred]
>
> I barely understand what this means so do not take what I say below as
> gospel: here it goes.
>
> With a client/server architecture, the server raises events to which
> the client reacts. For example, the server can raise an event when
> elements in an underlying database table has changed and the client
> may then proceed to refresh what information it shows on say, a form.
> To do this, the client refreshes 'everything' as it does not know what
> has changed.
>
> This approach is time-consuming and unviable for a browser-based
> application as it needs to be much more responsive - the hour glass in
> not a meaningful way of signalling a long process to the user.
>
> With subscribe/publish, the publisher is like the server with an
> important difference: the publisher does not know who the subscriber
> is or indeed how many of them there are. The subscriber is like the
> client only there may be several (or none). You might have a
> subscriber that listens only for changes, say, and signals that
> information to the application (GUI). Another example might be a
> subscriber that listens for signals to launch another process e.g.
> elements of an order may change that require parts of an invoice to be
> rebuilt.
>
> What client/server and subscribe/publish have in common is that the
> client (subscriber) reacts to events (serially) raised by the server
> (publisher); the important difference is that while the client/server
> architecture is synchronous (and 1:1, usually), the subscribe/publish
> architecture is not synchronous (and may be n:1, ie parallel).
>
> Hope this makes some sense.
This fits my understanding, but it is not very specific about
implementation. For a browser to be able to receive information which
is being "pushed", it must contain some code executing in the browser
(probably written in Javascript) which either implements a Web Server
and is listening for new connections (unlikely to work well behind
firewalls), or opens a socket to some service which occasionally sends
data down the wire. I don't see any reason why an APL server should
not be able to participate in a scheme like this.
This might be an interesting tool for someone to write and publish on
the APLWiki, to make a name for themselves as a web-savvy APLer :-).
I'm sure someone will need one soon...
Morten
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|
| > ... and is listening for new connections (unlikely to work well behind firewalls)
I tend to think that a subscriber could be a Windows Service running
on the web server - and, which gets initialised before any firewall
(?), so that is not an issue - and rebuilds the client web page
(selectively) and refreshes it i.e it does nothing to the structure of
the page and therefore, the underlying code should carry on working.
I have some idea of how this might work but not enough to demonstrate
it right away.
| |
|
| In article <6514e872-acd8-4dc5-ba33-8a114ccb8a9f@e25g2000prg.googlegroups.com>,
Morten Kromberg <mkrom@dyalog.com> wrote:
>On Jan 7, 9:07_pm, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
>
>I'm confident that the answer is "Yes", but I haven't been able to
>find out exactly what "subscribe/publish technology is".
It's simple in the email area: you subscribe to a list, when there's a
new message on a list that you subscribed to, it gets sent to you.
It's similar in other areas: you subscribe to a stockmarket server,
specifying which events you're interested in (trades in AAPL, price of
IBM reaching a limit, etc.) and when something like that happens, you
get a message.
The publisher has to have a list of subscribers and what they're
subscribed to, and be able to calculate who gets what message quickly
enough.
kdb comes with pubsubdemo.
Seth
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| vess_irvine@hotmail.com 2008-01-17, 9:59 pm |
| I too am looking for APL work in the USA, but I am very discouraged.
True, my tag line should be "30 years APL Fortune 500 sales,
programming & consulting." This approach seems hopeless now.
So I have changed my strategy. I am now either a .....
Derivatives Risk Analysis professional (these guys really need my help
cleaning up the subprime mortgage mess)
..... or .....
Professional Mechanical Engineer
...... or .....
Space Shuttle Designer
..... or ......
Mergers & Acquisitions specialist
<all true>
who happens to know APL (and C++ and AutoCAD).
Wish me luck. Better yet, call me with a job offer ........
Vess Irvine
Estes Park, Colorado, USA
970 449-2330
| |
|
| >The publisher has to have a list of subscribers and what they're
>subscribed to, and be able to calculate who gets what message quickly
>enough.
No! with subscribe/publish topology, the publisher does not know the
subscribers, how many of them there are or indeed if there are any.
| |
|
| In article <ceb6fc6f-b383-4b9e-990e-c29fb4ee1115@d21g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
AAsk <AA2e72E@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
>
>No! with subscribe/publish topology, the publisher does not know the
>subscribers, how many of them there are or indeed if there are any.
Then who does? Does your model include a distributor who the
publisher talks to, which handles the subscriptions?
Seth
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|
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| Jonathan Bell 2008-02-04, 7:01 pm |
| On Jan 4, 9:24 pm, MichaelHughes <Mich...@hughes.uk.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm based in the UK and I am looking for APL work. I have 25 years
> experience of commercial APL systems with just about all dialects.
>
> I am happy to work on site if in the UK or with a split with some
> telecommuting if in Europe or the US.
>
> Please contact me if you'd like a copy of my CV.
>
> Thanks Michael
>
> Mich...@Hughes.uk.com
Michael,
The company I work for is looking for an APL developer on a permanent
basis. However we are not based in the UK: rather sunny ol' New
Zealand. If you are even vaguely contemplating a lifestyle change,
please e-mail me your CV and I'll hand it over to the HR department.
(that goes for anyone else)
Cheers
| |
|
| On Jan 4, 9:48=A0am, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
> Michael, good luck with the search.
>
> I've just been through the same quest and reached an inevitable
> conclusion: no one is the UK recruits programmers whose language is
> APL, on a permanent basis.
Yes, you can work for First Derivatives in Northern Ireland. They are
constantly looking for k / q developers ... but it is by far the worst
company I have ever worked for....
| |
| Olivier Lefevre 2008-02-22, 7:58 am |
| fred wrote:
> On Jan 4, 9:48 am, AAsk <AA2e...@lycos.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Yes, you can work for First Derivatives in Northern Ireland. They are
> constantly looking for k / q developers ... but it is by far the worst
> company I have ever worked for....
I never worked for them but I can believe that. Some 10 years ago,
at a time when they were just starting with K and I was one of very
few people with actual, on-the-job experience of K, I tried to get in
touch with them. They had (at the time) a rather grotesque web site
for cv entry that required you to enter a lot of information by hand
and you were (I _may_ be wrong on this but I am pretty sure of it)
strongly discouraged from trying to make an end-run around that
rigmarole, e.g., by sending in your cv. I tried nonetheless, sending
a polite letter explaining my credentials, the reasons for my interest
etc and never heard back from anyone. They gave the impression of being
full of it or at least of having very poor execution. Just a data point.
-- O.L.
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