Arthur Whitney (born October 20, 1957) is a Canadian

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

most notable for developing three

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s inspired by APL: A+, k, and q, and for co-founding the U.S. companies

Kx Systems KX is a data analysis software developer and vendor. It is a business unit of AIM-listed technology and services group FD TechnologiesLON: FDP. Its KX Insights platform is built upon the proprietary time series database kdb+ and its programming l ...

and Shakti Software.

Career

Whitney studied

pure mathematics Pure mathematics is the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside mathematics. These concepts may originate in real-world concerns, and the results obtained may later turn out to be useful for practical applications, ...

at the graduate level at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

in the early 1980s. He then worked at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

. He was first exposed to APL when he was 11 by its inventor, Ken Iverson, a family friend. He later worked extensively with APL, first at

I. P. Sharp Associates I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) was a major Canadian computer time-sharing, consulting and services firm of the 1970s and 1980s. IPSA is well known for its work on the programming language APL, an early packet switching computer network named IPS ...

alongside Ken Iverson and Roger Hui among others. Whitney is recognized as having had an "enduring and significant influence on APL" and he co-authored papers with both Ken Iverson and Roger Hui. He also wrote the initial prototype of J, a terse and macro-heavy single page of code, in one afternoon, which then served as the model for J implementor, Roger Hui, and was responsible for suggesting the

rank Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as: Level or position in a hierarchical organization * Academic rank * Diplomatic rank * Hierarchy * ...

operators in J. In 1988, Whitney began working at

Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment management and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the fir ...

developing financial applications. At Morgan Stanley, Whitney developed A+ to facilitate migrating APL applications from IBM

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

s to a network of

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

workstations A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''worksta ...

. A+ had a smaller set of primitive functions and was designed for speed, and to handle large sets of time series data. In 1993, Whitney left Morgan Stanley and co-founded

with Janet Lustgarten, to commercialize his k programming language. According to Paul Ford's 201
cover-story
for ''Businessweek'', k is a programming language that is "famous for its brevity." The company signed an exclusive agreement with

Union Bank of Switzerland Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) was a Swiss investment bank and financial services company located in Switzerland. The bank, which at the time was the second largest bank in Switzerland, merged with Swiss Bank Corporation in 1998, to become ...

and Whitney developed a variety of trading applications using k until the contract expired. At the outset of the contract Whitney developed the kdb database built on k. In 2003, Kx Systems released q, a new vector language that built upon k and the kdb+ database developed by Whitney. In 2018, First Derivatives bought out Whitney and Lustgarten's minority shares of Kx Systems. Whitney and Lustgarten then founded Shakti. The Shakti platform has a small memory footprint, and allows for fast deployment and processing of distributed elastic workloads. It can work with all kinds of datasets, including numerical, temporal and text data, whether structured or not.

References

External links

*, Shakti *, Kx Systems *, Jsoftware {{DEFAULTSORT:Whitney, Arthur Canadian computer scientists I. P. Sharp Associates employees Programming language designers University of Alberta alumni University of Toronto alumni Businesspeople in computing APL implementers Living people 1957 births