Role Summary
Roger Kwok Wah Hui (December 29, 1953 – October 16, 2021 was a computer scientist and co-developer of the programming language J, and later Dyalog APL. He ran and maintained the Jsoftware website.
Biography
Hui was born in Hong Kong in 1953, and immigrated with his family to Edmonton in 1966. He enrolled at the University of Alberta in 1973, where he learned APL primarily from the APL\360 User’s Manual when it was required for a probability and statistics course in his second year. Hui retained his interest in APL, and was hired by Lib Gibson to work as a summer student at the Calgary branch of I.P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) for two summers, 1975 and 1976. After graduating with a B.Sc. in computer science, he was hired by IPSA’s Edmonton branch in May 1977. He left in 1979 to pursue a computer science M.Sc. at the University of Toronto, and graduated in 1981 with a thesis titled The complexity of some decompositions in matrix algebra detailing a recursive approach to operations including the Gram–Schmidt process for QR decomposition giving them the same computational complexity as matrix multiplication; this work would later be used for J’s matrix divide primitive. Before graduation he also met Ken Iverson for the first time, in 1981.
