I'm in the middle of a paradigm shift from designing software for radio test engineering systems to financial mathematics software. Five years of knowledge amassed in VB6, VB.Net, LabVIEW, TestStand, SQL and Tait's product range for not very much. Well so I thought.
What am I doing now? I'm bound by confidentiality clauses and certain aspects of professional conduct, but I can say I'm now developing software solutions in a computer language that is almost as old as FORTRAN. APL (A Programming Language) is a high level, powerful symbolic language with a small yet dedicated following. This opportunity to learn this highly mathematical tool can only benefit me. This is the language I've been waiting for.
It uniquely unifies my two professional interests and a strong data visualisation ability. Mathematics and software engineering have both been close to my heart for many years. For the last eighteen months mathematics has been coerced into a dismissively dismal few days of dedication to university. Now, finally, I have a vocation that frees my mathematical concerns from their cramped confines: They may engage in forays into my forty hour focus on financial follies! Alliteration and assonance. Turns out you can win a Booker Prize with that as your sole literary device. Sadly I have discarded the author's name from my memory so I cannot warn against her horrid, childish prose.
And, miraculously, years of effort understanding the intricacies of National Instruments' LabVIEW has not gone to waste. The overall principle of LabVIEW, dataflows, is a deep, underlying principle of APL, too. I never expected to see the concept implemented in a textual language. But then again it has been done linguistically since before the invention of Sanskrit. It's almost a natural and desirable progression from LabVIEW to APL*. APL is more powerful, more stable, highly optimised and not as bloated as LabVIEW. The downside is that the IDE is nowhere near as powerful or pretty. But I guess programmers have been living with that for longer than Visual Studio, Eclipse, SharpDevelop and JBuilder have been around. It is a pleasure to be learning APL. Its undeniable power is looking me square in the eye for my thesis. If I get that far.
Finally, a new job is tiring. Learning the business rules, the complexities of a new organisation, the software and the somewhat non-intuitive design decisions by my predecessors, even trying to decide on my superannuation options are all energy-consuming, brain-munching tasks. For the last three weeks I have been unable to face any extracurricular activities. Weekend mountain biking trips with my mate, Jaron, have been the extent of my extension.
Must get out more!
* = After hearing what LabVIEW did to Mathworks' Simulink, I'd be interested to see if any of National Instruments' patents are invalidated by APL.
