[HN Gopher] Roger Hui has died
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Roger Hui has died
Author : z0a
Score : 207 points
Date : 2021-10-17 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jsoftware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jsoftware.com)
| jhbadger wrote:
| I 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.
| max_ wrote:
| For 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
| maest wrote:
| > aioj.pdf
|
| Fitting file name, in the spirit of J's terseness.
| abrudz wrote:
| I 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
| atdrummond wrote:
| 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.
| a_c wrote:
| To my ignorance, I've never heard of J nor Roger. Learned someone
| and something new today. You will be remembered. RIP
| atdrummond wrote:
| This is shattering. I am glad he was able to be with family and
| friends; Roger was an immense help to me as I learned how to
| navigate APL/J and build a TSDB in the latter. He never let on
| that there were any health concerns - I feel guilty now for
| sending him so many messages over the last half decade.
|
| I hope he gets the recognition he deserves. What he and Iverson
| have developed is truly unique and powerful.
|
| EDIT: A bit macabre but Ken had his stroke on the 16th of October
| (2004) and died on the 19th. I know it's coincidence but my
| mammalian brain can't help but ascribe significance.
| mst wrote:
| > I feel guilty now for sending him so many messages over the
| last half decade.
|
| Knowing geeks, I wouldn't be surprised if part of why he didn't
| let on was because he didn't want to stop having fun geeking
| out.
| metagame wrote:
| Rest in peace. Roger Hui deserves a black bar just about as much
| as anyone.
|
| A (likely incomplete) list of his talks can be found here; if you
| have the time, you should watch at least some of them:
| https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Roger_Hui
|
| He dedicated a substantial portion of his life to the design and
| implementation of two of the last truly-unique languages in our
| field.
|
| We all owe him a degree of debt. If you use numpy, for example,
| you're actually closer to the heritage of his work than you might
| imagine; about two steps removed. Start from the top of this
| thread and work your way down (I am sorry for the source of the
| link, but none of the frontends cover threads this long and with
| this many authors):
|
| https://twitter.com/teoliphant/status/1115283666995941377
| bcantrill wrote:
| When 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 grieving this loss.
|
| [0] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242
| atdrummond wrote:
| 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 journal 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.
| cryptodan wrote:
| RIP and condolences to the people grieving
| Wistar wrote:
| A fine piece of tribute writing, that.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Sorry to hear this. I've never met him, but know of his work and
| blog posts on APL & J.
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