Arthur Whitney (computer scientist)

Arthur Whitney (born 1958 ) is a Canadian computer scientist. Whitney developed on the basis of the developed by Kenneth E. Iverson programming language APL different programming languages ​​, mainly in the finance industry and found to apply.

He grew up in Edmonton and studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto. He received his doctorate not, but worked for a time as an assistant in computer science courses. Whitney came in 1969 with APL in touch when he visited with his parents Iverson, who was a college friend of his father. From 1980 he worked with Iversen at the Canadian software firm IP Sharp in Toronto on the development of APL. The company developed, for example, time-sharing systems. From 1988 he worked for the brokerage firm Morgan Stanley, where he wrote A to develop real-time trading systems, databases and analysis systems for stocks, bonds and options. APL had already been popular, giving him the job much easier for in the financial industry as array-based programming language. They needed to trade a system that could (often in the form of columns and even then in the terabyte range ) quickly manipulate large amounts of data on an abstract level. In 1993, he left Morgan Stanley and founded his own company Kx Systems, where he was a successor to the language A , which is still used today in the financial industry, the language K developed, with associated database systems ( kdb ) and regularly improved in subsequent versions. Also, this is also based on APL language was used primarily in the financial industry use. Recently his company brought out the Q language. He lives in Palo Alto.

In addition, he wrote in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the base code for the programming language J, which was further developed by Iverson and Roger Hui. Hui was a fellow student of Whitney at the University of Alberta.