On 17 December 2020 a webinar was arranged to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ken Iverson. It turned into a truly global event with around 200 attendees from around the world.
The panel reflected on their experiences of working with and learning from Ken. The legacy of Iverson Notation for APL, J Q/Kdb and other languages was discussed together with the future of Iverson Notation.
The Webinar
1:45:370:00:00 / 1:45:38
The Panel
Roger Hui, Leslie Goldsmith, Rebecca, Devon McCormick, Morten Kromberg, Simon Garland, Stephen Taylor
Supporting material
“Ken Iverson @ 100” by Roger Hui
“Some thoughts on the occasion of Ken Iverson’s centenary” by Leslie Goldsmith
“The Future of Iverson Notation (PDF)” by Morten Kromberg
“Celebrating the work of Ken Iverson” by Dave Thomas
Follow up
Follow-up to the webinar in a Dyalog APL Chat Forum post by Roger Hui
I came up with an answer to one of the questions in my notes: BNF (Backus-Naur form) is a context-free grammar; as such it does not handle most programming languages. In spite of this serious inadequacy, BNF is the most commonly returned hit for a search on something like “notation for programming languages”.
I see also that something that looks like predicate logic may be used by the real PL geeks: Here
Devon McCormick
Blog on the centenary by Mark Sykes, COO of Kx