Arthur Whitney (computer scientist)

Arthur Whitney is a Canadian computer scientist most notable for developing the APL-inspired programming languages A+ and K and co-founding the company Kx Systems.

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 implementor, Roger Hui, and was responsible for suggesting the rank operators in J. In 1988, Whitney began working at Morgan Stanley developing financial applications. At Morgan Stanley, Whitney helped to develop A+ to facilitate the migration of APL applications from IBM mainframes to a network of Sun workstations. A+ had a smaller set of primitive functions and was designed for speed and to handle large sets of time series data.

In 1993, Whitney left Morgan Stanley and co-founded Kx Systems with Janet Lustgarten to commercialize his K programming language. The company signed an exclusive agreement with Union Bank of Switzerland and Whitney developed a variety of trading applications using K until the contract expired. At the outset of the contract Whitney developed the kdb database built on K. In 2003, Kx Systems released Q, a new vector language that built upon K and the kdb+ database developed by Whitney.

Whitney serves as a board member at Kx Systems.