"Arthur Whitney didn't do APL or J; those were from Kenneth Iverson with Roger Hui helping out on the later."
I am familiar with the history. I meant "journey" as in "progression through APL and APL-like languages". Iverson showed APL to Whitney when he was only 11 years old. Whitney created the first version of J, but then moved on, leaving it to Hui.
"Work began in the summer of 1989 when I [Ken Iverson] first discussed my desires with Arthur Whitney. He proposed the use of C for implementation, and produced (on one page and in one afternoon) a working fragment that provided only one function (+), one operator (/), one-letter names, and arrays limited to ranks 0 and 1, but did provide for boxed arrays and for the use of the copula for assigning names to any entity. I showed this fragment to others in the hope of interesting someone competent in both C and APL to take up the work, and soon recruited Roger Hui, who was attracted in part by the unusual style of C programming used by Arthur, a style that made heavy use of preprocessing facilities to permit writing further C in a distinctly APL style. Roger and I then began collaboration on the design and implementation of a dialect of APL (later named J by Roger) ..." - from Hui's "Remembering Ken Iverson", referencing Iverson's "A Personal View of APL" (http://keiapl.org/rhui)
In Appendix A, on that same page, you can find Whitney's code. It shows how differently he thinks about coding, and is likely a good example of Q's roots.
I am familiar with the history. I meant "journey" as in "progression through APL and APL-like languages". Iverson showed APL to Whitney when he was only 11 years old. Whitney created the first version of J, but then moved on, leaving it to Hui.
"Work began in the summer of 1989 when I [Ken Iverson] first discussed my desires with Arthur Whitney. He proposed the use of C for implementation, and produced (on one page and in one afternoon) a working fragment that provided only one function (+), one operator (/), one-letter names, and arrays limited to ranks 0 and 1, but did provide for boxed arrays and for the use of the copula for assigning names to any entity. I showed this fragment to others in the hope of interesting someone competent in both C and APL to take up the work, and soon recruited Roger Hui, who was attracted in part by the unusual style of C programming used by Arthur, a style that made heavy use of preprocessing facilities to permit writing further C in a distinctly APL style. Roger and I then began collaboration on the design and implementation of a dialect of APL (later named J by Roger) ..." - from Hui's "Remembering Ken Iverson", referencing Iverson's "A Personal View of APL" (http://keiapl.org/rhui)
In Appendix A, on that same page, you can find Whitney's code. It shows how differently he thinks about coding, and is likely a good example of Q's roots.