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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

#201

Post by gitonthescene »

secondary_op wrote: post #84

And I though that Skala, FP (monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X) people are pretentious sect, this is so much worse, given their customer base, I immediately presume that this is nothing more than approach to deliberately make things unintelligible for as many people as possible, so that your white collar hedge fund guy would have heart stroke just by glancing at this source code, not ev…

It’s not at all clear where you read pretentiousness. Is it the mere fact of its existence?

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

#202

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

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 AW said comments get out of date with all the changes, if you can’t read the code you Shldnt be working on it.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..

> if you can’t read the code you Shldnt be working on it

An ultimate expression of insider elitism and knowledge hoarding, which can be a self-interested asset to profitable, closed-source, specialized software.

For everyone else, code should present no surprises whenever possible with semantic expressiveness and reserve comments for explanation of surprises, design choices, and protocols.

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

#203

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

magicalhippo wrote: post #59
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 AW said comments get out of date with all the changes, if you can’t read the code you Shldnt be working on it.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..

> if you can’t read the code you Shldnt be working on it I don't know this AW guy, but to me that's a huge red flag and a sign that a programmer hasn't worked on anything substantial. Ie non-trivial stuff that's maintained by a team over time. Being able to read the code is irrelevant, as the comments should tell you why the code is doing what it's doing. For example, yeah I trivially can see the code is doing a retr…

> hasn't worked on anything substantial

This isn't the case. It's more likely a lack of business socialization combined with individual hyper-achievement. Reminds me of Ian Pratt in some ways.

An annoyance in tech, both startups and corporate, is technically-capable people but with outsized egos.

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

#204

Post by viraptor »

stefano wrote: post #61

Those are some very big claims with respect to performance. Has anyone outside of the author been able to reproduce the claims, considering you need to pay 100k/month just to do it? I also wonder if the commercial version has anti-benchmark clauses like some database vendors. I've always seen claims that K is much faster than anything else out there, but I've never seen an actual independent benchmark with numbers. E…

The comparison posted may be true, but on some level it doesn't make sense. It's like this old awk-vs-hadoop post https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

Yes, a very specific implementation will be faster than a generic system which includes network delays and ensures you can handle things larger than your memory in a multi-client system. But the result is meaningless - perl or awk will also be faster here.

If you need a database system, you're not going to replace it with K, if you need super fast in-memory calculations, you're not going to use a database system. Apples and oranges.

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

#205

Post by JonChesterfield »

tresclow wrote: post #157
wood_spirit wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a tangent but it’s a thought experiment that I recently heard: Data pipeline A is written and maintained by a team in a type safe language with extensive unit tests. Data pipeline B be was written long ago by a scientist who has since left, in sql in a day. Both compute the same dataset, but B gets the answer correct. Which is the better pipeline, and why?

And how do you know B's answer is correct?

In the world of science you get to compare software's predictions against reality. It's a weird concept but it grows on you.

I've seen systems with this structure. Part of the fun is B's code is likely to have a lot of errors in it that cancel each other out in exciting ways when running on the domain of interest, which makes using it to work out why A's code is failing to correspond to reality much harder than it could be.

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

#207

Post by t-3 »

taf2 wrote: post #109
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 ;-)

I’ve always told myself- no matter how smart my idea is , if no one else understands it it could be as if it didn’t exist.

Nobody needs to understand the code except for the people writing and maintaining it. The users just need it to run.

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

#208

Post by xelxebar »

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #202
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..

> if you can’t read the code you Shldnt be working on it An ultimate expression of insider elitism and knowledge hoarding, which can be a self-interested asset to profitable, closed-source, specialized software. For everyone else, code should present no surprises whenever possible with semantic expressiveness and reserve comments for explanation of surprises, design choices, and protocols.

I don't know about you, but if you don't know the basics about woodworking and have no interest in learning, I certainly don't want you building my furniture. That, um, has nothing to do with elitism.

There is a real tradeoff between making code friendly to the uninitiated and making code ergonomic for the expert. It's completely natural that non-initiates feel unwelcome when the code is written for domain experts. In your company's codebase, is it really best to optimize for onboarding newcomers over optimizing for the productivity of your engineers? Where along that spectrum maximizes your goals?

Are we building chairs or are we building chair-builders?

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

#209

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Other than ngn/k ...

https://ktye.github.io/kdoc.htm

https://github.com/ktye/i/releases/download/latest/k.c

IIRC, some old UNIX versions had an APL interpeter in the userland. For me, a k interpreter could be the ultimate UNIX utility. But interoperability with pipes and other UNIX utilities is awkward to say the least, as is having to use other programming languages as duct tape.

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

#210

Post by gitonthescene »

eigenvalue wrote: post #101
wood_spirit wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how did your perf compare to the best of the K kicking quants around you? Were they too being less productive than they would have been in python? I’m not saying they were right or better. Horses of courses. Array languages do my head in and my choice is sql.

I was able to explore new ideas much much faster using Python than the experienced k people could. But creativity is more important anyway. Ultimately, having good ideas/data/signals trumps fancy or fast data wrangling. Glad I’m doing other things now in any case.

Any detail whatsoever would make this a more credible claim. I haven’t met many people, including those skeptical of the performance claims, who have called K _slow_. Maybe for particular domains but I’d doubt that includes the kind of quant work that gets done at Millennium.
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