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

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

most notable for developing three

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s inspired by APL: A+, k, and q, and for co-founding the U.S. companies Kx Systems 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 university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

in the early 1980s. He then worked at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. 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 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 operators in J. In 1988, Whitney began working at

Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in 42 countries and more than 80,000 employees, the firm's clients in ...

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

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

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., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

workstations. 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 Kx Systems 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 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 Canadian computer businesspeople APL implementers Living people 1957 births