On Jan 5, 2:17=A0pm, AAsk <AA2e...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 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
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