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Impending kOS

archive.vector.org.uk

21–30 of 242 posts

Re: Impending kOS

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I posted four lines of Chinese or Sanskrit, it's likely that native English speakers would disagree that they had much meaning either. However, this doesn't mean that those lines are inherently devoid of meaning or difficult to parse.

I think that the issue is that just measuring simplicity in terms of number of lines is a bad metric. You can have extremely complex expressions in a single statement that are at least as hard to read and debug as an equivalent, much longer piece of code that employs temporary variables and single-purpose statements.

I disagree fundamentally.

I have noticed every page I scroll causes a comprehensive loss of around 90%, so in reading something that is 10 pagefuls long, I might only be able to produce a tiny part of the program.

Your milage may vary.

I find not scrolling, and just moving my eyes, I rapidly absorb the program, and I find most bugs just by reading the code. This practice is absolutely impossible for me if I have to scroll very far and made difficult by scrolling at all.

It is for this reason that I find simply counting the actual words to be an excellent estimate of complexity.

By the way: There are several temporary variables in that code; c:: creates a view called "c" which automatically updates whenever the dependent variables on the right side change.

Re: Impending kOS

#22
post #18

>Kdb+ has sharp elbows. No shit. I used to work as a quant, and while I was an okay quant and mediocre trader at best, I survived for three years in the industry because of my kdb+ proficiency: the firm I was at spent a couple of million dollars on kdb+ only to find out that most people could not wrap their heads around kdb+ let alone debug it effectively. My (former) colleagues were definitely smart people. In many…

Why were you a proponent of kdb+?

Re: Impending kOS

#23
post #18

>Kdb+ has sharp elbows. No shit. I used to work as a quant, and while I was an okay quant and mediocre trader at best, I survived for three years in the industry because of my kdb+ proficiency: the firm I was at spent a couple of million dollars on kdb+ only to find out that most people could not wrap their heads around kdb+ let alone debug it effectively. My (former) colleagues were definitely smart people. In many…

Why were you a proponent of kdb+?

For several reasons, some more legitimate than others.

1. kdb+ was (and maybe is) a good solution to the problem that we had: doing complex data manipulation/simple statistical calculations against billions of rows of time series data. Hadoop is the term du jour for data processing, but truth of the matter is that finance doesn't have really huge data. At best, it's a couple of terabytes, and most of the time, you are working with a small subset of it. Running KDB+ on a beefy server or two would usually do the job (rather well).

2. Maybe because I studied math, but I find k/q's vectorial/functional sematics appealing. I think the syntax is horrible, but the semantics is very neat.

3. Finally, because it helped me keep my job. It was rather amazing to me that all these Ph.D. statisticians that I worked with couldn't bring themselves to learn kdb+ effectively. Apparently this stuff can be very hard for even the smartest people (or maybe they thought it was such a niche skill with a low ROI).

Re: Impending kOS

#24
post #18

>Kdb+ has sharp elbows. No shit. I used to work as a quant, and while I was an okay quant and mediocre trader at best, I survived for three years in the industry because of my kdb+ proficiency: the firm I was at spent a couple of million dollars on kdb+ only to find out that most people could not wrap their heads around kdb+ let alone debug it effectively. My (former) colleagues were definitely smart people. In many…

Why were you a proponent of kdb+?

[deleted]

Re: Impending kOS

#25

> kOS is coming. Nothing will be the same afterwards. There seems to be this strange idea going around that if we just get the right tool, everything else is going to change forever. I see this a lot with people trying to create IDEs that let non-programmers create programs without really knowing how to code. But the thing is, most people just don't have anything worth coding. The problem isn't that the tools don't e…

Not knowing how to code is not really an issue because we can and do teach people how to code the same way we teach people how to count and do basic algebra. What we can't do well is teach people how to solve novel problems that they haven't encountered before.

Re: Impending kOS

#26

> kOS is coming. Nothing will be the same afterwards. There seems to be this strange idea going around that if we just get the right tool, everything else is going to change forever. I see this a lot with people trying to create IDEs that let non-programmers create programs without really knowing how to code. But the thing is, most people just don't have anything worth coding. The problem isn't that the tools don't e…

I don't know, think bigger. The internet changed things forever, and before that computers. Revolutions have been happening at exponentially increasing rates. The explosion of software complexity we see today is perfectly ripe for innovation and maybe even could cause another revolution. The software industry isn't exactly mature when you take a longer time perspective.

Re: Impending kOS

#27
post #2

Um, so what happened?

It's not done yet.

This summer, Pierre and I got kOS to boot directly into g (the graphical interface; formally called z) with ISR, keymap, modesetting, basic filesystem, etc weighing in around 100 lines of C. That was pretty exciting. Could probably be done with less with some deeper changes to Arthur's code, but it's still very useful to run k under Linux. Oleg made a silly little game in kOS.

Arthur and Oleg did some performance benchmarks staging k against q (current kdb+), Postgres, some "popular RDBMS" (that I can't name), and MongoDB. It was impressive that k is so much faster than q, but it also really underscores the cost of the wrong data structure (and how hard it is to get the right one with SQL or MongoDB).

Re: Impending kOS

#28
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that his lines are Can you write this editor in one line of less than 6000 chars of javascript (without a "textarea")?

It does not matter. This is not a programming language; languages are designed for human comprehension. Human comprehension is an irreducible part of the whole paradigm of programming, being necessary to understand the nearly always complex logic required to describe anything of value. This is gibberish. It fails at the one task of a programming language: to translate something a human can understand into something a…

Any language you don't know is gibberish—hence the proverb, "it's all Greek to me." Please don't dismiss the unfamiliar just because it's strange.

Re: Impending kOS

#29
I wonder what K would look like with bit reader-friendly syntax. I tried running a program that supposedly "will take a K expression and produce its English translation" (http://kx.com/a/k/examples/read.k), but either it doesn't work with kdb+/q or I can't figure out how to use it. Does anyone have some example output, or advise?

Re: Impending kOS

#30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that his lines are Can you write this editor in one line of less than 6000 chars of javascript (without a "textarea")?

It does not matter. This is not a programming language; languages are designed for human comprehension. Human comprehension is an irreducible part of the whole paradigm of programming, being necessary to understand the nearly always complex logic required to describe anything of value. This is gibberish. It fails at the one task of a programming language: to translate something a human can understand into something a…

No, it is just not a language for the masses who have gotten used to all programming language syntax being minor variations on the Algol/Pascal/C theme.

Much like math and physics, this is an extremely terse notation that is immensely useful to those who practice it, and looks like gibberish to those who have not attempted to study it. You could give the same comment about an article in any area of math whose notation you are unfamiliar with -- and you would be just as equally wrong.

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