Re: Vector themed issue: How to wear sheepskin

crishog, I do not have any issues with your assessment of IT managers.
However, they control the purse strings and in so far as survival
instints go, I do not think APL people are that different from them.

The key points are:

A. We have to work with them as we find them. We have been shouting
about how good APL is from the roof tops for over 30 years; in the
last 20 of these, it seems that those who had been hearing us have now
gone deaf. So we need to adopt another strategy, one of small
beginnings, and to adapt to the IT decision making process as we find
them. There is no denying that .NET (like everything that preceeded
it) is the future (until something else supplants it).

So, as I said, the strategy must be to take APL to .NET rather than
bring .NET to APL i.e. we need to speak and act as .NET following the
perceived conventions for doing so. For example, the conversations
(negotiations if we get that lucky) must use .NET jargon and much much
less of APL jargon. For me that means 1) APL people must learn and be
ready to deploy standard technologies 2) APL people ought to make a
big effort in learning more about everything other than APL to be
effective.

B. IT managers do not commission software for the sake of it; they do
so as a means of adding value to the businesses they are in. The
process seems lethargic because it involves planning, timing, budgets,
training, and risks (internal) and an assessment of the competitors
(external). APL people are just interested in producing the software
first, and now, and then worry about everything else later. APL people
must recognise due process a lot better.

I know APL very well but I also know other technologies equally well.
If I am investigating a problem, I do all my explorations is APL. Very
often this means translating the elongated solutions in other
languages into APL and adapting such worked examples to my specific
needs. Nothing fits like a glove. As an ancillary benefit, I have
learn't that if you can write APL, you write non-apl better than those
who do not know APL.

Having said that, I do not know if I can explain exactly why APL is
better with the same conviction as so many other people in this forum.

Other languages provide a richer set of primitives (keywords), have
provided control structures longer than APL has, have better
documentation for working with industry technology like databases,
APIs etc (in fact shelf full of them in evey bookshop) and have also
got arrays, including nested arrays. Such languages are also much more
'open' than APL when it comes to their infrastructure, version
control, worked examples on the internet etc and IT managers have a
choice when it comes to recruiting staff.

In other words, APL shares all the hallmarks of other languages. Is it
the case that the average APL person is 'smarter'? If so, we have no
chance as nothing we can do will make others smarter.

So, what have I been missing?