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Roger Hui has died
- atdrummond 5y agoThis 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 5y ago> 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 5y agoRest 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 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 https://twitter.com/teoliphant/status/1115283666995941377
- _pmf_ 5y ago> of two of the last truly-unique languages in our field. What is the other one?
- 7thaccount 5y agoSorry to hear this. I've never met him, but know of his work and blog posts on APL & J.
- max_ 5y agoFor 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 https://www.jsoftware.com/books/pdf/aioj.pdf
- archibaldJ 5y agothis is super cool; I wonder if some of the concepts can be applied in building Codex pipeline just found https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/haskell/jfh.html https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/haskell/jfh.html to cross-ref stuff when I get lost
- maest 5y ago> aioj.pdf Fitting file name, in the spirit of J's terseness.
- cryptodan 5y agoRIP and condolences to the people grieving
- Wistar 5y agoA fine piece of tribute writing, that.
- abrudz 5y agoI 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 https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/TAOaxioms.htm
- atdrummond 5y agoThank 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.
- bcantrill 5y agoWhen 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 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242
- atdrummond 5y agoFor 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.
- bcantrill 5y agoWow, 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 5y ago[deleted]
- a_c 5y agoTo my ignorance, I've never heard of J nor Roger. Learned someone and something new today. You will be remembered. RIP
- jhbadger 5y agoI 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.
- jim-jim-jim 5y agoRIP 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.
- thesuperbigfrog 5y agoBlack banner posted. To honor Roger's passing. A time to reflect.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- quantified 5y agoMet him a long time ago when J was relatively new, through a friend. Didn’t know anything about him except he was a friend colleague of my friend. And we was such a mellow, soft-spoken, nice guy. Who I learned a few months later was both seriously smart and had made this thing that had inspired me. Real loss.
- hhyndman 5y agoRoger was a colleague of mine when I worked at IP Sharp. Lovely guy. My condolences to his family. Rest in peace.
- chagaif 5y agoWhat chat would he insist on?
- jxy 5y agoIt would be the chat mailing list. See http://jsoftware.com/pipermail/chat/2021-October/thread.html http://jsoftware.com/pipermail/chat/2021-October/thread.html
- unnouinceput 5y ago68 years young. Fuck cancer (my father died from it at 71). RIP.
- formvoltron 5y agoSorry to hear that. F cancer. My Dad is dying now from it. 83 but the time has gone so fast. He was otherwise in top shape. I have high hopes for the new blood test that can detect several types of cancer at a very early stage. It's in trials now in the UK.
- molticrystal 5y agoI wanted to learn more about "J" and this person, it is a nifty language Some people might enjoy this thread on "A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity (2012)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16393873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16393873 Also this answer here at math stack exchange https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/856153/the-j-programming-language-is-it-useful-for-mathematics/1761055#1761055 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/856153/the-j-progra...
- masklinn 5y agoThe SO answer is easy to follow right until the final operator “/“ where it just goes “magic”. That’s less than helpful as the rest is quite straightforward aside from the syntax. Its very short description of the two-arguments version make it sound like a fold, but that wouldn’t generalise to what looks like a cartesian product, would it?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 5y agoIf I understand it right "*/" results in a function that applies "*" between its arguments. "~" takes the function f(x) on its left and the argument y on its right and turns it into f(y, y). So the right side of the tilde evaluates to a range 1..10. I think the tilde then turns its left and right into "*/"(1..10, 1..10), resulting in 1..10 * 1..10
- danparsonson 5y agoSomething akin to a map operation maybe?
- icen 5y ago/ does different things depending on the arity of the preceding function. 'f/ x' is 'insert' - i.e. reduce, so that '+/ 1+i.10' yields 55. 'x f/ y' is 'table', inserting 'f' between each pair to form a generalised multiplication table. The documentation for j is unsurprisingly terse, but it is complete and very helpful. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/slash#dyadic https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/slash#dyadic
- joe_the_user 5y agoI met Roger briefly as a presentation on J at SFSU. He seemed like a mellow, straightforward person and I enjoyed how he explained a one-page long set of c-macros that expanded into the initial J compiler (written by Ken Iverson or someone else). I remember asking him, "How do you debug something like that" and he said "don't make mistakes".
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoI first ran into J from their ICFP submission one year. The J implementation did quite well in the contest despite being shockingly terse, and running on an interpreter. That prompted me to figure out why, and I learned a lot of interest if unconventional ideas as a result.
- jacknews 5y agoRIP Is this the reason for the black stripe on HN? Is there a way to click the stripe or otherwise see the reason for it, other than scanning posts for the sad news?
- jodrellblank 5y agoOne 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/ https://www.dyalog.com/blog/2015/07/permutations/ [2] https://youtu.be/e0rywC7-i0U?t=2254 https://youtu.be/e0rywC7-i0U?t=2254 [3] talk is taken from his writing here, I think: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/50/ https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/50/
- Vaslo 5y agoI’ve been seeing more and more of these unfortunate postings lately. I often only hear of these contributions or even the languages themselves after the person passes on, which is unfortunate. Hope his family is ok.
- MikeGale 5y agoRoger made a major contribution, in a quiet way. Thoughts are with all those who miss him.
- felicopter 5y agoThis is sad news indeed. A couple of things about Roger: The less important one: his Erdős number is 2, thanks to his coauthoring "A generalization of the fast LUP matrix decomposition algorithm and applications" with Shlomo Moran whose Erdős number is 1. (It's not shown on his Wikipedia page, but he's listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_by_Erd%C5%91s_number#H_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_by_Erd%C5%91s_n... .) Roger was a great example of "precision with humanity", like Ken Iverson. This was obvious in many ways, and here's an unusual one: I've managed various technical groups over the decades, and Roger was the only person who, when he said he'd have something done by a particular date, was finished by that date, every single time. When he ran into a snag I would sometimes tell him that it would be okay if it took longer, but no, as far as he was concerned he'd made a commitment and was going to meet it, even if that meant working a lot of extra hours. Rohan Jayasekera