Obituary of Kenneth Iverson - Celebrating His Life and Work

Coming back from this year’s Iverson College, I brought home quite a lot: a mountain of new knowledge, newly made friends, some unforgettable experiences, and the rather harsh reality of having to adjust to life without two private chefs again.

But among all of that was something far more valuable: a rarely seen piece of computing history.

The obituary of Kenneth E. Iverson, inventor of APL and one of the most influential figures in the history of array programming.

For many of us working with k and q today, Iverson’s influence is closer than we sometimes realise. His ideas fundamentally changed how programmers could think about notation, arrays and computation. Those ideas went on to influence generations of language designers and developers, including, of course, Arthur Whitney, whose work ultimately gave us k and, through it, q.

In that sense, those of us working in the k and q ecosystem today are all, to some degree, Iversonians.

The obituary offers a wonderful glimpse into the life and work of the man behind those ideas: not merely a programming-language designer, but someone whose way of thinking about computation continues to influence how many of us write software decades later.

This little piece of history was kindly shared with me by Rob Hodgkinson during Iverson College. Rather than allowing it to disappear back into a drawer or archive, I wanted to help make it available to the wider community.

So, for anyone interested in APL, array programming, k, q, or simply the history of the ideas that shaped the languages we use today, I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did.

A small piece of history, preserved and shared with the next generation of Iversonians.

Celebrating the life and work of Kenneth E. Iverson.

Credit: Thanks to Catherine Lathwell and the Iverson family for the permission to share this video