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Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

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Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#191

Post by jjtheblunt »

mrob wrote: post #60

Is there some application that demonstrates the utility of this language? E.g. it's tempting to dismiss Haskell as something invented by mathematicians more concerned with the elegance of their abstractions than actually getting things done, but Pandoc is so undeniably good and useful that you're forced to admit Haskell can be a good choice. What's the Pandoc of K?

i know Formula 1 has enormous, voluminous, live data feeds streamed from the cars, and god knows where else; kdb/q supposedly enable such.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#192

Post by cess11 »

koolala wrote: post #165
freedomben wrote: post #134

For those who haven't heard of or aren't familiar with K, the Wikipedia page[1] has a remarkably helpful brief overview: > K is a proprietary array processing programming language developed by Arthur Whitney and commercialized by Kx Systems. The language serves as the foundation for kdb+, an in-memory, column-based database, and other related financial products. The language, originally developed in 1993, is a varian…

Does it support imaginary numbers or did they take them out like everyone else...

J supports them well, so I'd guess K does too.

And many programming languages do, for example C# and Racket. I have a feeling it isn't very hard to implement, since that's what you typically do if you need complex numbers in Java.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#193

Post by cess11 »

NKosmatos wrote: post #82

He might be a smart person, with a very high IQ and on a different level than the rest of us, but by writing with this style, with no comments, with no proper capitalization/style and with this attitude, he’s putting me off (IMHO). Oftentimes, the way something is presented and how the language is used, might be as important as the thing itself ;-)

Might want to read Notation as a Tool of Thought: https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...

If you want you can switch out his terse names in the .h and .c and see if that helps. I'm not so sure it does, but experience with array languages and a couple of decades with rather advanced C will. As in, experience is what matters rather than "IQ".

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#195

Post by rscho »

IshKebab wrote: post #190
rscho wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For using a heap of libs to compute something that has been done a thousand times? No. For writing a completely new data processing pipeline from scratch? Much, much faster! Array langs have decent performance, but that's not why they are used. They are used because you develop faster for the kind of problem they're good at. People always conflate those two aspects. I use J for scientific research.

Yeah to be clear I meant performance-wise. In terms of development speed it looks like it just goes to insane extreme on the "fast at the beginning / fast in the middle" trade-off. You know how dynamic typing can be faster to develop when you're writing a one-man 100 line script, but once you get beyond that the extra effort to add static types means you overtake dynamic typing.

Performance-wise I'll admit I don't really know. But I do know that performance is at least decent, in that it lets you experiment easily with pretty much any array problem. Your dynamic/static typing analogy is pretty much on point.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#196

Post by 082349872349872 »

koolala wrote: post #166
defrost wrote: post #27

K by Arthur Whitney: http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10010830 vector the journal of the British APL Association

let them eat APL

When your eng dept comes to you and says "Boss, we want arrays!", then let them eat APL.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#197

Post by gitonthescene »

frankjr wrote: post #32
cloudbonsai wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not believe it, but that's how K/Q/J people write C code. Bonus: Go visit and do "View Source" on that website. Even HTML has fragrance of K.

I don't understand how. How do you debug something this? How do you go about fixing a bug? There are no docs nor tests. It seems like one would spend hours just trying to understand what's going on. Is there a good source on their methodology? Because my mind is blown.

Using a debugger is basically out of the question. The theory is that the conciseness and lack of fluff makes it easier to reason about once you’ve mustered the requisite focus.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#200

Post by 082349872349872 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #23
rwillink wrote: post #17

He showed K @ Royal Society & bunch of apl & aplus guys were there. Someone asked , where are the comments? AW said comments get out of date with all the changes, if you can’t read the code you Shldnt be working on it. We then all looked at each other..

So far the highest ratio of comment to code I've seen is Hsu's thesis (~200 pages of commentary[0] to ~20 lines of code[1]) at 10 pages/line. [0] https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstreams/dcbd5240-8454-... [1] https://www.bonfire.com/co-dfns-thesis-edition/ (a) come to think of it, theses are one and done (b) thanks to Kragen for pointing out this 02019 work!

Heh, I just noticed Hsu's "above average" shirts: ⊢>+⌿÷≢

One of these days I need to (a) learn more about the Berber culture, and then (b) write an array language which exploits the ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ symbology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh#/media/File:Tifinagh_...

https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/natlang/berber/tifinagh/tifinagh...

https://www.edition-originale.com/media/h-3000-saint-exupery...

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