APL Cultivation

APL Cultivation was a series of 90-minute live chat lessons given by Adám Brudzewsky in the APL Orchard chat room in the period 2017–2020. Over the course of 2021–2022, Stefan Kruger edited the content into a book called APL Cultivations.

The first season consisted of 29 weekly sessions running from 18 October 2017 until 16 May 2018, covering most aspects of basic APL programming. Initially, the lessons were not organised, but were given completely impromptu. However, between lessons 2 and 3, Erik Konstantopoulos bookmarked the first two lessons using Stack Exchange's chat conversation bookmarking feature, and thus established the lessons as a numbered series. The name was first used for lesson 15 at the end of January 2018, but was since applied retroactively to all such lessons.

The series continued on 28 November 2019, with more in-depth lessons every two-three weeks. This was sparked by interest among participants of a presentation by Morten Kromberg and Aaron Hsu called Pragmatic Array Oriented Functional Programming, held during Jio talks 2019, after which a series of "APL Hacknights" were to be held in the APL Orchard. However, the audience of the first such eventtypos turned out mostly to be people who had not been at the Jio talk, and it was decided to fold this new series into a continuation of the previous one. This series ran for 20 sessions until 25 August, 2020.