51–60 of 93 posts
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I don't know about Golang but there are languages where this sort of highly domain-optimized, super terse syntax could be embedded as a domain-specific sublanguage, in a significantly less hackish way than what C allows.
I'm not that knowledgeable, and def not a C apologist, but what language are you thinking of? To my eyes, that is some heavy abuse of the preprocessor in a way that I don't think almost any modern "safe" language could possibly countenance. I read that code like he got the expressivity benefits of a lisp macro system with close-to-the-metal C speeds in like 100 lines of code. I'm curious what else could do this.
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my fascination with Q/kdb/K/... disappeared once I had to debug it in production you want a stack trace? tough luck, you'll get back: `type and that's it
backtrace has been supported for some time. the debug facilities are nice https://code.kx.com/q/basics/debug/#stack-frames
at some point we might upgrade to java 8!
I have a longstanding fascination with K and other "modern" APL derivatives. There are a few intersecting truisms about coding that I believe: one is that people's working memory varies: some have an immense amount, some less. Humans definitely process spatially better than in time series (e.g. comparing side by side rather than turning over a page.) This implies you should prefer succinct code and languages because…
In your opinion, what would be a language that comes closer to K’s functionality but at the same time be understandable to mere mortals?
I have a longstanding fascination with K and other "modern" APL derivatives. There are a few intersecting truisms about coding that I believe: one is that people's working memory varies: some have an immense amount, some less. Humans definitely process spatially better than in time series (e.g. comparing side by side rather than turning over a page.) This implies you should prefer succinct code and languages because…
This is super accurate, and interesting in the context of the repo. It’s clearly not the most accessible language or style - I wonder if someone who has hyper optimized for themselves in the way Arthur has can write an effective teaching language. It requires a theory of mind for minds that are probably quite different in the general case.
This looks like a cult I would happily dive into. Does anyone care to ELI5? I tried to read the code but did not understand a single line
Arthur Whitney is showing how to build an array language using C in array language form. AW is known for kdb+ which is often used in finance due to its extreme performance properties and ability for quants to quickly explore ideas. Personally, to get a better handle on how array languages worked, I implemented KlongPy which is a python implementation of Klong, which descends from K (which AW wrote). You have to play…
What it's really great for is that it's really neatly integrated into the q language, which is great for exploratory programming, and it's fast enough not to get in the way.
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Sounds right. Additional examples at https://github.com/louyx/aplus/blob/master/src/a/k.h https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum How would you characterize that? Heavy use of the C preprocessor and C defaults to embed a functional programming language. Language with a small number of core functions and ability to apply functions to lists of atoms. Aesthetically favoring short identifiers and minimal white…
You know how when you first start learning to code, the kids who really "get it" right away start off thinking shorter code = smarter code = better code? k always seemed like a bunch of those kids managed to become highly accomplished and brilliant engineers without ever breaking that terrible habit. Is there actually a reason to write these array languages (and interpreters for them, apparently) this way, or is it j…
They're more readable and less buggy that way. But unfortunately most programmers would rather spend 10 days reading 100,000 lines than 4 days reading 1,000 lines.
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Ha! The guy who wrote this is the same guy who invented ~~APL~~ a number of APL inspired languages (Edit: He did not invent APL. Thanks for the corrections!), so I suspect he may just be built different. https://www.jsoftware.com/ioj/iojATW.htm Have you seen anything written in K itself? Here's a program to calculate primes: 2_&{&/x!/:2_!x}'!R
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Arthur Whitney is showing how to build an array language using C in array language form. AW is known for kdb+ which is often used in finance due to its extreme performance properties and ability for quants to quickly explore ideas. Personally, to get a better handle on how array languages worked, I implemented KlongPy which is a python implementation of Klong, which descends from K (which AW wrote). You have to play…
FWIW, kdb+ is not that extremely performant - there's a lot of things that could be faster, and a lot of limitations that mean that you often would be better of not using a DB at all (or to use another DB and just pull everything you might need into memory). There is/was a tradeoff in that many things that would make it faster would require more code, and a cool thing about q/kdb+ is that it takes so little code you…
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