interview

A CONVERSATION WITH ARTHUR WHITNEY

Photography by Tom Upton

A few well-chosen words about programming languages from a long-time designer

When it comes to programming languages, Arthur Whitney is a man of few words. The languages he has designed, such as A, K, and Q, are known for their terse, often cryptic syntax and tendency to use single ASCII characters instead of reserved words. While these languages may mystify those used to wordier languages such as Java, their speed and efficiency has made them popular with engineers on Wall Street.

Whitney began his Wall Street career in the 1980s, building trading systems at Morgan Stanley using his

own version of APL (the language on which all of his later languages are based). Eventually he started his own company, Kx Systems, which today provides realtime and historical data-analysis software to many Wall Street investment banks. The company’s signature product, KDB+, is a column-oriented database based on the K language.

Eager to learn what’s behind Whitney’s unique languages (and curious to see if his reputation for concision carries over into real life), we invited him to speak with