23 cash prizes to be won by students with an equivalent number of introduction awards

Basingstoke – UK, 12th May 2011: Dyalog Ltd., which markets Dyalog APL - the most commonly used APL programming language throughout the world - announces the launch of their 2011 World Wide Computer Programming Contest. The purpose of the contest is specifically to encourage students and others to investigate APL (A Programming Language); the organisers hope that participants will find that exposure to APL broadens their horizons and adds a new tool to their toolbox. A fully featured copy of the latest release of Dyalog APL is available free of charge to students, whether or not they wish to participate in the contest.

Students of other disciplines than Computer Science are also encouraged to participate: Many of the most successful APL users have backgrounds in other sciences, and have found APL to be a “Tool of Thought” for expressing solutions to problems in a wide variety of fields. Last year, the competition was won by Ryan Tarpine, a computational biologist from Brown University.

A total of US$12,600 in prize money has been provided by several sponsors, including US-based Fiserv, Italian based APL Italiana, Danish based SimCorp and UK-based Dyalog Ltd., as well as several anonymous individuals and companies. The First Prize winner can look forward to US$2,500 plus a round trip travel from anywhere in the world where the winner lives to the Dyalog '11 Conference in Boston Massachusetts, USA, during October 2-5 2011, where they will receive the award in person and present the work that lead to winning the prize. Second and third prizes will be awarded with US$1,200 and US$600 respectively and a further 20 contestants will receive US$100 each. Additionally, the people or organisations that introduce the winning students to the contest will receive the same dollar prizes – and they need not be students to make the introduction.

The scoring and judging of submissions is organised and sponsored by a group APL programmers who owe their careers - and a good deal of pleasure - to their work with the APL language.

Contest participants can either use the Microsoft Windows or the Linux versions of Dyalog APL, or any other version of APL as long as it is converted to the Dyalog APL platform. Tools are provided on the contest website for interchange format conversion.

Although the contest is open for anyone (except contest organisers and employees of Dyalog Ltd.), participants are made aware that only students are eligible for the Grand Prize and must meet the criterion for a free Dyalog Educational License. They can apply for this directly via the Dyalog website. Introduction prizes can be won by anyone.

Deadline for submission is 12:00 UTC (Noon), Sunday August 14, 2011. First, second and third prize winners will be announced on August 22, 2011, and the remaining winners, as well as the introduction award winners, will be announced during Dyalog ’11 in Boston, 2-5 October, 2011.

For more information on the programming contest rules and submission of entries please go to www.dyalog.com/contest_2011/index.html

About Dyalog
Dyalog is the world’s leading APL software-development platform. Key to Dyalog is the dynamic programming language APL - a notation which closely resembles Algebra - which is extremely well suited for expressing solutions to complex problems. Dyalog is further a complete, integrated software development platform offering all the tools and interfaces a software developer needs.

Dyalog is particularly well-suited for development of software applications where it is important to embed a high level of domain expertise. The development platform is designed to facilitate that experts, such as economists or engineers, can write software programmes themselves or work in close collaboration with a programmer to ensure, that their expert knowledge is correctly expressed.

Dyalog is heavily used in the financial sector where companies such as Denmark’s SimCorp A/S, and Italy’s APL Italiana S.p.A. use the system for their commercial financial software application development. Dyalog is further used within various engineering disciplines such as refinement of crude oil and within logistics. Other examples include: in Sweden, a small system developed by a nurse and a programmer has now grown into Sweden’s largest Patient Record Solution. In the UK, in less than 3 months, The Childcare Company Ltd developed and launched their online training and support solution, winning them the Nursery Management Today Innovation Award 2008.

Dyalog is developed and marketed by British-based Dyalog Ltd.

Dyalog is available on the following platforms: Microsoft Windows (NT, 2000, ME, XP, Vista and Mobile), AIX, Solaris and Linux. For more information on software development using Dyalog visit www.dyalog.com.

For further information, please contact:
John Waite / Vibeke Ulmann
Catalyst Communications
Tel: +44 (0) 845 226 3036
Fax: +44 (0) 845 226 3136
Email: john.waite@catalystpr.com / vibeke.ulmann@catalystpr.com