Arthur Whitney is a mad genius. We were an early customer of KX systems and I programmed with KDB for a few years. Arthur Whitney once sat at my desk and helped me debug my code. Very nice guy. Super smart and hilariously knowledgeable about the low level performance of chips, caches, etc. Ask him how many nanoseconds it takes to divide an array of doubles by an array of ints, and he knows. He just knows.
Origins of J
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Origins of J
#12“…and that’s why we have code formatters.” That’s neat and impressive. I’m glad I’m not required to read or understand it.
It really doesn't help that it's written in ancient K&R C, but if you spend ten or so minutes just staring at it, familiar shapes and patterns start to appear. (Give it a try!) Incidentally, it's in line with how APL code looks like an alien artifact at first, but you get used to it fast if you have spatial reasoning to wrap your head around reshaping and transposing.
If you focus on the middle and move your head back and forth eventually you see a 3D image of Dykstra pop out and he doesn't look happy at all.
Re: Origins of J
#13Arthur Whitney is a mad genius. We were an early customer of KX systems and I programmed with KDB for a few years. Arthur Whitney once sat at my desk and helped me debug my code. Very nice guy. Super smart and hilariously knowledgeable about the low level performance of chips, caches, etc. Ask him how many nanoseconds it takes to divide an array of doubles by an array of ints, and he knows. He just knows.
This kind of story is what I enjoy so much about HN. I wish Kdb+ or Shakti had dramatically lower costs for those industries that don't have access to banking cash. I know open source versions exist, but I understand them to mostly be toys and not really production worthy.
Re: Origins of J
#14“…and that’s why we have code formatters.” That’s neat and impressive. I’m glad I’m not required to read or understand it.
Once I put the effort to understand code like this and it turned out it's straightforward once you learn the conventions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421524
[deleted]
Re: Origins of J
#15Arthur Whitney is a mad genius. We were an early customer of KX systems and I programmed with KDB for a few years. Arthur Whitney once sat at my desk and helped me debug my code. Very nice guy. Super smart and hilariously knowledgeable about the low level performance of chips, caches, etc. Ask him how many nanoseconds it takes to divide an array of doubles by an array of ints, and he knows. He just knows.
This kind of story is what I enjoy so much about HN. I wish Kdb+ or Shakti had dramatically lower costs for those industries that don't have access to banking cash. I know open source versions exist, but I understand them to mostly be toys and not really production worthy.
[deleted]
Re: Origins of J
#16Arthur Whitney is a mad genius. We were an early customer of KX systems and I programmed with KDB for a few years. Arthur Whitney once sat at my desk and helped me debug my code. Very nice guy. Super smart and hilariously knowledgeable about the low level performance of chips, caches, etc. Ask him how many nanoseconds it takes to divide an array of doubles by an array of ints, and he knows. He just knows.
This kind of story is what I enjoy so much about HN. I wish Kdb+ or Shakti had dramatically lower costs for those industries that don't have access to banking cash. I know open source versions exist, but I understand them to mostly be toys and not really production worthy.
K is at the end of the day a fancy calculator, I think for most workloads you can use the open source version called ngn/k
Re: Origins of J
#17Arthur Whitney is a mad genius. We were an early customer of KX systems and I programmed with KDB for a few years. Arthur Whitney once sat at my desk and helped me debug my code. Very nice guy. Super smart and hilariously knowledgeable about the low level performance of chips, caches, etc. Ask him how many nanoseconds it takes to divide an array of doubles by an array of ints, and he knows. He just knows.
This kind of story is what I enjoy so much about HN. I wish Kdb+ or Shakti had dramatically lower costs for those industries that don't have access to banking cash. I know open source versions exist, but I understand them to mostly be toys and not really production worthy.
KlongPy sits on NumPy so gets pretty far. For some features, it’s still early days.
Http://klongpy.org
Re: Origins of J
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of story is what I enjoy so much about HN. I wish Kdb+ or Shakti had dramatically lower costs for those industries that don't have access to banking cash. I know open source versions exist, but I understand them to mostly be toys and not really production worthy.
K is at the end of the day a fancy calculator, I think for most workloads you can use the open source version called ngn/k
This - https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok - can also be used sometimes...
Re: Origins of J
#19The code in C that suppose to be written like this is usually never written
first like that, its like pretending writing minified js by hand from scratch.
Usually the code is contracted and "minified" from large program to
fit entire program into 1-3 screens, the person who manually "minified" it to
that state will know its expansion but other people will dismiss it as obfuscated C,
its an old technique to fit lots of code into 80x25 type terminal.
Not surprising since J is optimized for code density per screen.
Re: Origins of J
#20The code in C that suppose to be written like this is usually never written first like that, its like pretending writing minified js by hand from scratch. Usually the code is contracted and "minified" from large program to fit entire program into 1-3 screens, the person who manually "minified" it to that state will know its expansion but other people will dismiss it as obfuscated C, its an old technique to fit lots o…
Nope, Whitney just codes like this.