Rich Park

Rich discovered APL shortly after discovering Dyalog Ltd’s headquarters on his own doorstep in Bramley. One day, whilst walking his dog and father, Rich rang the office doorbell to inquire about any software-related opportunities that might be available. He had developed an interest in computers from using them at young age, building circuits for A-level electronics and learning about the physics of computers (as well as computational physics) at University. If only Rich had been able to convey any of that to Jay Foad, who answered the door, instead of just standing there like a “gormless idiot” (his words) as his father jumped in and asked about internships and job opportunities…

Rich went home that evening and browsed Dyalog Ltd’s website… the Pandora’s Box of APL edged ajar, and he began to learn about the symbols. He also sent an amusing email explaining the earlier awkward encounter and clearly showed that he was not a “gormless idiot” as this resulted in a meeting with the CEO and CXO, Gitte and Morten, in October 2018. After that meeting, Rich showed enough aptitude and interest, while pair-programming a simplistic physics simulation with Morten, that they decided to keep him.

Given that Rich’s previous experience includes programming an autonomous robot for his school team in the 2012 and 2013 Student Robotics competitions, and using MATLAB and CERN’s ROOT library to run simulations and process experimental data, he was very surprised that he had never heard of APL before. He sees a potential in APL to develop domain-specific programming languages and software packages to help teachers convey concepts in a way that more closely matches the syntax and jargon in which problems are already described.

He hopes to introduce many more people to APL so that fewer future experts have to be deprived of APL’s prowess in conveying problem solutions to computation engines. As an APL evangelist, he’s currently the main administrator of the APL Wiki , is a semi-regular panelist on the Array Cast podcast and has a YouTube channel on which he occasionally posts APL videos. He’s mustering up the courage to confess his own personal duck collection.