Arthur Whitney

Arthur Whitney (born October 24, 1957) is a Canadian computer scientist most notable for developing three programming languages inspired by APL.

Whitney studied pure mathematics at graduate level at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s. He then worked at Stanford University. He worked extensively with APL, first at I. P. Sharp Associates alongside 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 implementer, Roger Hui, and was responsible for suggesting the rank operator in J. This operator was eventually added to APL using the  symbol.

Whitney implemented a cut-down version of APL, A, designed for speed, and to handle large sets of time series data. It was expanded into A+. He then made a radical departure from the APL tradition, developing several variations on his own language, K. The newest of these variations is under active development through his company Shakti Software, which he founded in 2018.