Vector Product Guide

The next issue of Vector will probably appear without the Vector
Product Guide, the first issue to omit it for a long time.

The reasons this time are technical. We're converting the production
process from Word to DocBook, an XML-based markup in wide use for
technical publishing. Dyalog has been generous in allowing me time to
work on this conversion, but the Product Guide is unlikely to make
Vector 23:4.

Browsing the guide in V23:3 I can see several addresses I happen to
know are out of date. Also glaring omissions: we have no listing for
the active NYC J User Group. Jim Goff has been offering consulting for
years, but Beautiful Systems, Inc. appears only as a contact address.
Kx Systems has contact details but you wouldn't know from our Guide
that you can download q from its site.

I wonder if the guide is serving anyone. Should we maintain it at all,
and if so, what should be in it?

I can see value in listing

1. consultants and companies who offer services: software development,
support and training;
2. vendors of interpreters and of development tools, including books
3. communities

For all these I would list only web addresses for contact.

This would leave the guide looking like this:

SERVICES: Provider, URL, Service
INTERPRETERS: Vendor, URL, Product
DEVELOPMENT TOOLS: Vendor, URL, Product
COMMUNITY: Group, Location, URL

This excludes software products and services built using APL;
dedicated APL hardware; and reselling interpreters without any other
services. (Most of this left unmourned some time back.)

It also excludes contact details for individuals who aren't offering
services or products. I think there is a demand for this information,
but the place for it is ACM SIGAPL's White Pages, or Kai Jaeger's APL
Wiki, where people can make and maintain their own home pages.

Absent comment in this thread, the Guide is likely to appear as above
on the website and disappear permanently from printed issues.

Stephen Taylor
editor@vector.org.uk

Stephen,
It may be entirely sensible to put the guide on the Web, but I will
miss it in the printed copies of Vector. I can't claim to read it
item by item every issue, but I actually enjoyed seeing who was doing
what with APL and getting a sense that there were people making a
living with APL. This may be a good occasion to thank Gill Smith for
keeping it up. Curtis

--- In dyalogusers@yahoogroups.com, "Michael Hughes" <Michael@...>
wrote:
>
> I have received 2 contacts through it in the past but I seem to have dropped
> off the list. :-(
>
> I just assumed it continued - I must have missed an update.
>
>
>
> The small consultants rather than the bigger firms still need somewhere to
> list their names and I always believed it was one of the purposes of Vector,
> bringing the APL people together. Its also useful when you change mobile
> phones and lose your contact details so you can look up old friends :-D
>

One of the persistent issues Morten & Gitte encounter with customers
and prospects is "how do I find programmers?". Vector has an
indispensable role to play in answering this question, so my own view
is that we must list service providers at least.

These days I would suppose anyone offering services also maintains at
least a web page with contact details and keeps it current. So our
service-provider listing will be most accurate if it lists only URLs
for contact.

Social 'contact' entries dilute the comfort offered by listing service
providers.

In principle, I'm sympathetic to Vector hosting perhaps a kind of
'alumni news' for what people are up to these days. In fact, I'd like
to read that myself. In practice, we have to counter a perception of
APL as a cult for wrinkly techies. If we had as many readers under 30
as we had over 60, I'd be more relaxed about this. (That said, if
anyone volunteers for a 'social editor' role and writes a quarterly
report on what people are up to, even if it IS playing golf in
Florida, I'll find a way to make that work.)

Web 2.0 has made the web such a rich resource for social networks that
persisting with print for social 'contact' entries risks reinforcing
existing prejudices against us. ACM SIGAPL's White pages have been
around for a long time. (Are they still maintained?) Kai Jaeger's APL
Wiki hosts homepages you can edit yourself. (Mine:
http://aplteam2.com/aplwiki/StephenTaylor) Can we make one of these
work for us?

Michael, send me your current details and I'll ensure you're listed as
a service provider.

Stephen Taylor
editor@vector.org.uk