To my ignorance, I've never heard of J nor Roger. Learned someone and something new today. You will be remembered. RIP
Roger Hui has died
11–20 of 48 posts
Re: Roger Hui has died
#12For those of you that are not familiar with Roger Hui, he is the author of "An Implementation of J"[0]. Which is a fantastic resource if you want to know how to implement an array programming language. [0]: https://www.jsoftware.com/books/pdf/aioj.pdf
> aioj.pdf
Fitting file name, in the spirit of J's terseness.
Re: Roger Hui has died
#13I thought it was interesting that the notice about Roger's death was by Eric Iverson. The name struck me because Ken Iverson was the creator of APL and I wondered if they were related. Looking it up, they are. Eric is Ken's son -- so interest in APL has gone across generations.
Re: Roger Hui has died
#14I had the pleasure of working with him for several years. I count the paper we wrote together[0] (well, it was mostly him that wrote it, but we worked out the theory together) as one of my greatest achievements. [0] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/TAOaxioms.htm
Thank you for your work - it was immensely helpful for our J-lang TSDB. I am hopeful that I can get interest/support soon to open source it, as Roger was pushing me to do so. He frequently sent me comments or suggestions that referenced your joint publication. I know he was quite proud of it.
Re: Roger Hui has died
#15When I interviewed Arthur Whitney in 2009[0], Roger came up again and again. (He only appears in the transcript once, but Arthur spoke of him several times, always with great fondness.) Roger clearly had an outsized influence on Arthur -- in addition to his particularly close relationship with computer science pioneer Ken Iverson. Condolences to his family -- and to his close friends like Arthur, who I know must be g…
For what it’s worth, Roger felt you did a superb job on this interview with Arthur - he referenced it a number of times in our correspondences. Which is somewhat funny, as him doing so kind of brought my personal computing journey full circle in a weird way; your work and evangelism on Solaris is what convinced me to get involved in POSIX development in the first place.
Re: Roger Hui has died
#16RIP to a real one. I've played with all the major array langs, but J is the one I keep coming back to. There's still so much more I have to learn from this guy.
Re: Roger Hui has died
#17When I interviewed Arthur Whitney in 2009[0], Roger came up again and again. (He only appears in the transcript once, but Arthur spoke of him several times, always with great fondness.) Roger clearly had an outsized influence on Arthur -- in addition to his particularly close relationship with computer science pioneer Ken Iverson. Condolences to his family -- and to his close friends like Arthur, who I know must be g…
For what it’s worth, Roger felt you did a superb job on this interview with Arthur - he referenced it a number of times in our correspondences. Which is somewhat funny, as him doing so kind of brought my personal computing journey full circle in a weird way; your work and evangelism on Solaris is what convinced me to get involved in POSIX development in the first place.
Wow, I'm deeply honored that he felt I did right by Arthur, and just wish that I had had the opportunity to meet Roger. Thank you very much for sharing that, and may his legacy serve to inspire a rising generation of bold thinkers!
Re: Roger Hui has died
#18One of his memorable blog posts was on generating permutations in array languages[1]. In his spoiler explanation he comments about generating permutations of 0..4 starting from permutations of 0..3 and a "magical matrix" to do that, and then discusses:
"What is the “best” perm function I can write in APL? This “best” is a benchmark not only on my own understanding but also on advancements in APL over the years." and then shows one he wrote in 1981, one from 1987, then "I worked on perm from time to time in this period [1990-2007] but in J rather than in APL", then one from 2008, and one from 2015, and where future improvements might be found. In a video talk on it he says "some of these sub-expressions can be improved, but the APL language cannot yet express the thought that I have"[2]. I just like that pattern of returning to the same problems and polishing both the language and solution over multiple decades.
[1] https://www.dyalog.com/blog/2015/07/permutations/
[2] https://youtu.be/e0rywC7-i0U?t=2254
[3] talk is taken from his writing here, I think: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/50/
Re: Roger Hui has died
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it’s worth, Roger felt you did a superb job on this interview with Arthur - he referenced it a number of times in our correspondences. Which is somewhat funny, as him doing so kind of brought my personal computing journey full circle in a weird way; your work and evangelism on Solaris is what convinced me to get involved in POSIX development in the first place.
Wow, I'm deeply honored that he felt I did right by Arthur, and just wish that I had had the opportunity to meet Roger. Thank you very much for sharing that, and may his legacy serve to inspire a rising generation of bold thinkers!
[deleted]
Re: Roger Hui has died
#20Black banner posted.
To honor Roger's passing.
A time to reflect.