A Brief Review of APL98 --by NcuiUe Holmes School of Computing University of Tasmania atmosphere, a s~/e. APL98 had a very strong Roman atmosphere, a style that said, well, we might be hot and sticky, and we might not know quite what is going to happen or when, but when it does happen it will be worthwhile and in the best of humor--at least at the Conference. I did have a hotel desk man lose his temper with me a bit when I had trouble making a telephone call, but what the heck. APL98 was two things for me. It was a conference of people who are peculiar in the same style that I am peculiar in, and this makes the event a kind of revivalist meeting. There are old friends and new friends, and a companionship that people who do not work with APL/J for a living cannot find elsewhere. APL98 was a cultural experience. Living in a city like no other city, going to and from the Conference in a bus was an adventure in itself--no two routes the same. And you can take a different walk every evening among buildings and people like those in no other city. APL98's social program was particularly memorable, though perhaps only people of a general British background could experience the particular pleasure of listening to medieval Italian and French songs in an Angfican church alongside an Irish Pub. And as for the Roman banquet, the only missing ingredient, I heard several people remarking, was the couches. Probably the non-APL aspects of a conference are most memorable because the actual conference seems largely to be the same conference transported to a different context. But it was good to hear, in the obligatory "why haven't we conquered the world?" forum session, so many people saying we should be looking at the doughnut, not the hole, saying that we have lots to be positive about and the negatives aren't that important. It was good to hear that master entertainer, Eric Baden, telling us how to make a mint of money out of our special skills, if we are so inclined. He almost made me change my own inclination; certainly I thought about it afterwards. He reminded me of my favorite salesman colleagues in the long-gone IBM of my youth. C ONFERENCES HAVE AN A I R A B O U T THFF.aM, a n As for the technicalsesZ sions, they were much like $ the technical sessions in past A P L Conferences I have attended. The bravery of those people who seld o m present in English, many for the first time, who struggle with a language that traps even those who speak it natively, is intensely admirable. Really, those who are not native speakers of English, but who must deal with it professionally, have a great advantage over monolingual English speakers, the kind of advantage that APLers have over ordinary computer users--the mental stimulation and facility must be well worth the strain and anguish of learning to do it. T h e plenary sessions at APL98 were particularly impressive. Damn it all, Morten Kromberg sounds like an Engfishman nowadays. And all the plenary speakers were excellent role models, and of splendid variety. If only my computing students could come to conferences like these, only attending the plenary sessions would be inspirational. But it would be useless to videotape them: you have to actually be there. As for the other sessions (I went only to the papers and the tutorials), they were the usual mixture of stimulating and useful ideas, and technical teasers. For example, the first session I went to was Richard Brown's and, apart from the interest of the comparison with MATLAB, a package standardly used by my mathematician colleagues, I learned that I will have to switch from = . to = : if I want my J scripts to work with future J releases. T h i n k how much heartache that saved me! But you can never be sure what will happen in a paper session when it's anAPL conference, because the APL people can give anything an extra twist. My best example of this at APL98 was a paper presented by Umberto Piasentin on APL used for demographic studies in Umbria. T h e use of APL was fairly standard, but the figures he showed stimulated an excited discussion that I overheard being carried on at lunch even though Eric Baelen's talk had intervened. So APL conferences for me are social and technical events that I go to ifI can. Maybe i f I follow Eric's B's advice I can get to go to them all. • .Neville Holmes was trained as an electrical engineer and a patent examiner, and spent thirty years in the computing industry in Australia and overseas, before "retiring" to Tasmania where he has spent ten .years lecturing in what is now the School of Computing of the University of Tasmania. He can be reached at '~Veville.Holmes@ utas. edu. au ': APL Quote Quad

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