Roger Hui

Roger Hui (born 1953) is a computer scientist and co-developer of the J programming language.

He was born in Hong Kong and he immigrated to Canada with his entire family in 1966.

In 1973, Hui entered the University of Alberta. In his second year he took a course on probability and statistics in which students were expected to learn the APL (programming language) with little or no formal instruction. He used all the time he could muster on a heavily-burdened computer, and benefited from the APL\360 User's Manual (APL Language was not published until March 1975). Because the manual was written by Adin Falkoff and Kenneth E. Iverson, Hui thinks it reasonable to say he learned APL from Falkoff and Iverson.

As a summer student in 1975 and 1976, Hui worked at I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) in Calgary, on workspaces for statistical and probability calculations. The major attraction of the job was the unlimited computer time with access to APL.

After receiving a B.Sc. degree with first class honors in computing science in 1977, Hui worked for two years as a full-time programmer and analyst in the new Edmonton office of IPSA, where his principal duty was to support clients in their use of APL time-sharing. He attended the APL79 conference in Rochester, New York, where Iverson gave two papers: "The Role of Operators in APL" and "The Derivative Operator". On the way, Hui stopped at IPSA in Toronto and obtained a copy of "Operators and Functions" [IBM Research Report No. 7091, 1978]. He has been studying that paper and its successors ever since.

In September 1979, Hui entered the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and received his M.Sc. in May 1981 with a thesis on "The complexity of some decompositions in matrix algebra."

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