Meet Marshall Lochbaum
Marshall joined Dyalog Ltd as a programming language implementor at the beginning of February 2017. He joins Dyalog with a wide variety in programming skills and languages such as J, C/C++, Javascript, x86, Python, Java, Haskell, Scala, MATLAB and Factor.
Marshall has been involved in J programming and J's implementation prior to joining Dyalog, and he has experience in writing and testing high-performance C code with gdb, gprof and Valgrind. He also has a strong background in parallel and concurrent programming and is a Linux user with proficiency in using git/Github, LaTeX and vim.
Marshall undertook an extensive mathematical education at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he graduated as Master of Science, Computer Science in May 2016. His Master's thesis covered "Research on the fast multipole method, with emphasis on the properties of FMM octrees under-subdivision as well as parallel computing."
Marshall says "My experiences with array languages began pretty early: J was the first serious programming language I used! While planning my courses for my junior year of high school, one of the teachers at Raleigh Charter offered to mentor me in a self-study course on J. The name Henry Rich is well-known in the J community, but I had met him while competing in various math contests for which he helped organize the school's teams. Before taking the class, I had only programmed calculators in TI basic, but after reading Henry's book on J, I quickly began writing code. I spent much of my junior year working on programming projects, a habit which continued in college.
"At the University of North Carolina, I took the typical courses in computer science (as well as an extensive list of mathematics classes), but it's worth noting that my interest in implementing programming languages started pretty early as well. By my second semester as a freshman I had begun work on an experimental language called I, based on a theory that unified J's forks and array operations and extended them to arbitrary data structures. I also attended (and spoke at) Jsoftware's array programming conferences in 2012 and 2014, and found out about Dyalog from their presentations at the same.
"I finished graduate school (a CS masters) and started looking for a job in the spring of 2016. Asked about what I wanted to do, given complete freedom, I would answer that I wanted to implement programming languages. I had done some work like this at Jsoftware, but the company didn't have the funding to support a full-time position. You can imagine my surprise when I remembered about Dyalog and found that their website advertised for a "programming language implementor"! So far, the job has been exactly what I had hoped: I spend all day writing intricate array algorithms to make Dyalog APL as fast as possible, and work with a great group of programmers as hooked as I am (but all in different ways). I could get used to that".
Prior to Joining Dyalog, Marshall worked as a programmer at ThomasNet under Ken Lettow and Erik Iverson. He's also been an intern programmer at BEST with Thomas Costigliola, and most recently he was a programmer at Trill Financial.
Originally born and raised in the U.S., Marshall has now moved to the U.K. and works at the Dyalog office in Bramley.