Meeting

BAA Annual General Meeting 2006

Anthony Camacho, secretary
acam@blueyonder.co.uk

Minutes of the AGM of the British APL Association on 19 May 2006 at the Royal Statistical Society. (We inexplicably failed to publish these last year. Ed.)

Paul Grosvenor, chairman, opened the meeting by listing the agenda. He said the Association had had a quiet year in which Ray Cannon’s moot had been the outstanding event. At the morning committee meeting it had been suggested that the association support work of various kinds to promote APL. He had noted six projects:

1. Develop Stephen Taylor’s approach to system production (as in his article on “Pair programming” in Vector 22.1) into a book.
2. Republish the “At Play with J” and/or the “J-ottings” columns in book form.
3. Produce a primer in APL covering the major implementations for which a free or nearly free interpreter is available. This might be accompanied by a CD or DVD containing the interpreters. It would require careful liaison with the vendors.
4. A series of case studies with object lessons in what APL is good at. Each of these could serve to spark interest in non-APLers. Conference proceedings and Vector articles could be mined.
5. Improvements and enhancements to the web site to provide an interpreter which could be used for experimenting with APL and a Wiki.
6. Make available video recordings of noteworthy presentations or sound recordings of interviews with APLer who had interesting tales to tell.

Paul concluded that the APL Association would be willing to provide seed money to help with such projects and encouraged everyone to propose a project that they were keen on and would help with. Send details by email in the first instance to Ian Clark or to any of the committee. Addresses are in the back of Vector.

Nicholas Small, treasurer, circulated and spoke to the accounts. The apparent increase in expenditure was not all real because he had underestimated the outstanding bills included in last year’s accounts and these inflated this year’s outgoings. Income from advertisements had dried up while Vector timing was unpredictable. There were no questions.

Ian Clark reported on two current projects: work with Mathematica (promoting APL and Mathematica together) and making the complete Vector archive available on the web site. On the first project little progress had been made but he does have a copy of Mathematica to work with. On the second he has a workspace (VARCH) which converts articles from the Vector disk circulated at Madrid into suitable HTML. Each article needs some extra work as the process is not completely automatic. If anyone needs a particular article he could probably bring it to the top of the pile and convert it soon; please ask. To Paul’s list of projects he suggested adding a volume of material by and about Gérard Langlet – a sort of festschrift.

Stephen Taylor reported on Vector. This time last year his aim was to get back on schedule. He was sorry to say that we are as late now as we were then. However Vector 22.2 is at the printer and he hopes Vector Vol 22.3 will go to the printer within a fortnight. Furthermore the material for Vector Vol 22.4 is all collected and he hoped it would be ready to print in a month. Vector 22.3 is the Iverson memorial edition. Stephen also reported that he had done away with the Vector APL forum, which had been misused and made contributions vulnerable to spam.

Paul Grosvenor then asked for a proposer and seconder for next year’s committee (the same as this year). John Toop and Richard Nabavi volunteered. The committee was elected.

There were no questions to officers and no other business so the AGM closed at about 2.35 pm.