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DYNA26 Trip Report

_2026-05-03

2026 marks 60 years of APL.¹

DYNA26 lives up to this milestone. Good variety of presentations and half from young APLers. The talks themselves will be uploaded so I won’t say much on those. Slides at https://dyalog.com/north-american-user-meetings/dyna26.htm

Day Before: Anime bookstore and Diamond District

I arrived the day before and found Kinokuniya a block from the venue². Their Bang Dream and Project Sekai CDs stood out to me. Don’t see those often. They also have Fate/Stay Night and a Touhou data book. Markup is high but better than nothing.

Next I went to a street of jewellers’ shops in the Diamond District, many of which are customers of BIG. Mark Wolfson talked about helping family shops with inventory last Sep³.

Day of: Dave Thomas, Jacob, and more Bookstore

I got to talk to Dave Thomas⁴. We had more chats in the next few days.

Jacob of FIXAPL⁵ joined during Kyle’s talk. The 3 of us went to Kinokuniya. Search “kinokuniya” in APL Farm⁶ for a photo.

Bonus: NixOS NYC Meetup

Shortly after DYNA26 I went to the New York Nix Meetup at Anterior⁷. I met the devs behind dune2nix. We talked about reproducibility problems with Dune and their S-expressions parser in Nix⁸.

I met Jesse⁹ again. We exchanged Nix tricks, dotfiles management practices, and terminal workflows. Lots to try on my end.

I met Ben at Anterior, who went to the New York APL Meetup in 2022¹⁰! We were both fans of Conor’s work and talked about learning from his videos¹¹.

As usual I showcased tryapl.org to folks there. For Evan¹², a seasoned Haskeller, I brought up the Combinator Graphic¹³ for comparison with array langs. I forgot to bring up arraybox.dev :( . Next time I shall.

Appendix

DYNA24, NY Nix Meetup, (and LispNYC Social) also fell on the day 2 years ago¹⁴. That’s where I first met Jesse.

“Youngness” computations:

      ⍳⍤≢⍛,young
[
 1  'The Dyalog Road Map'                           'Morten Kromberg'    0
 2  'An APL App End to End'                         'Rich Park'          0
 3  'Migration Tools for APL Systems'               'Morten Kromberg'    0
 4  'Parsing User Input for Database Normalisation' 'Kori Smith'         1
 5  'Parsing User Input for Database Normalisation' 'Mark Wolfson'       0
 6  'APL Primitives in the 21st Century'            'Asher Harvey-Smith' 1
 7  'Enhancements in Dyalog v20.0'                  'Asher Harvey-Smith' 1
 8  'Consuming REST APIs in APL with OpenAPI'       'Holden Hoover'      1
 9  'Jarvis and AI'                                 'Brian Becker'       0
 10 'AVG – A Voxel Game'                            'Kyle Croarkin'      1
 11 'The APL Trust – Update'                        'Mark Wolfson'       0
]
      (⊢⌿,⍥(+⌿)(≠⊣⌿))⍉young     ⍝ presentations / total
5 10
      (+⌿,≢)⊢/∪0 1↓young        ⍝ speakers      / total
4 8

   (⊢˝∾○(+´)·∊⊣˝)⍉young         # presentations / total
⟨ 5 10 ⟩
   (+´∾≠)⊢˝˘⍷0‿1↓young          # speakers      / total
⟨ 4 8 ⟩

um:=/(!#:;?/(::;::)@\:)@\:
(+/'(*|:;um@*:)@\:)@+young      / presentations / total
5 10
(+/;#:)@\:(*|)'?1_'young        / speakers      / total
4 8

   (([:>]/),&:(+/)([:~:[/))|:young      NB. presentations / total
5 10
   (+/,#)>]/"1~.0 1}.young              NB. speakers      / total
4 8

Uiua: left as an exercise ;)