The same story told again -- it's aim is to generate this magical atmosphere around a fast db engine and language that's deliberately obfuscated to make people who work in it feel smart, so they try to spread that it's the best. KDB/Q is a nice tool, not the holy grail how they put it. And it's not fast because they know something better - it's because it lacks almost any safety measure.
Impending kOS
41–50 of 242 posts
Re: Impending kOS
#42I'm interested in a kOS with a "god says ..." program built in ...
Re: Impending kOS
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a fun experiment. I studied linguistics in college, and I do not think anyone ever discussed textual density of different languages with the "same" content (the latter part would be its own terrifying chestnut; if you have not studied machine translation and semantic eval and good luck ever confirming such a statement). I studied Arabic a lot, and Chinese about a year. I cannot speak to Chinese with only one…
Russian is actually less dense than even english, but compensates it with flexibility. The phrase above could be written in a lot of different ways, which would emphasize different parts of the sentence, and give it a different tone.
The written a lot of different ways is also the case with Arabic, except for the one word limitation, since obviously Subject-Verb-Object encoding in one word requires the word order.
If we loosen that req, it gets more interesting. I assume Russian will line up with the following.
In Arabic, the default in formal Standard Arabic (not the dialects, that is another can of Bedouin worms) is Verb Subject Object. You can, however, have VSO, SVO, OSV, OVS, depending on context. I think you decline and conugate verbs in Arabic as you would in Russian. So you can probably play with written form, emphasizing different parts as you suggest in a similar way.
Am I way off? That is what I gathered from Russian/USSR republic kids I have befriended over the years. Not sure if that scans.
Re: Impending kOS
#44Googled around, Kuro5hin (that's a name I haven't seen for some time) has a tutorial for K from 2002: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/14/22741/791 The download link at http://www.kparc.com/ asks for password, so I'm not sure whats going on with that.
You have to have a personal invite to download the code atm. The whole article is telling you it is not available yet, but "if coming".
Re: Impending kOS
#45Earlier 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")?
Someone skilled in writing compact JS probably can. People write amazing programs in 1k & 4k of JS: http://www.google.com/webhp?#q=javascript+4k
Yes.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between codegolfed K and codegolf in essentially any other language:
Codegolfed k uses 1-letter variable names, and drops white spaces (which, unfortunately, is kind of idiomatic). But everything else is idiomatic even for the non-golfers.
Codegolfed JS or C much more often than not is non-idiomatic in order to save all that space.
e.g., compare the K Sudoku solution from http://kparc.com/z/game.k to any other language, and you'll see that the K code is almost a generic solver (the 3, 9 and 10 stand for box size, board size and number of options respectively while setting up the constraints for the solver), whereas every other short solution (that usually come about twice as long to 10 times as long) is extremely specific to the standard sudoku table.
That's not random - idiomatic K solutions tend to be more generic than other languages. The syntax and semantics gently push you towards more general and more efficient solutions compared to most languages, in that the more general (and/or efficient) solution is usually shorter and simpler to code than a specific case.
I know it sounds unbelievable. But you might believe it when you see example after example and realize that it's not just a "one trick pony". And still, most people surround it with a SEP field. I recommend spending the time needed to grok it instead. [Or APL or J; my personal preference is K, but to each his own]
Re: Impending kOS
#46The same story told again -- it's aim is to generate this magical atmosphere around a fast db engine and language that's deliberately obfuscated to make people who work in it feel smart, so they try to spread that it's the best. KDB/Q is a nice tool, not the holy grail how they put it. And it's not fast because they know something better - it's because it lacks almost any safety measure.
Ridiculous comment. Have you at least tried q? K? Kdb+?
Re: Impending kOS
#47Kind of curious to play around with that text editor. Any chance of K running on OSX?
Re: Impending kOS
#48Earlier 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.
That is a fun experiment. I studied linguistics in college, and I do not think anyone ever discussed textual density of different languages with the "same" content (the latter part would be its own terrifying chestnut; if you have not studied machine translation and semantic eval and good luck ever confirming such a statement). I studied Arabic a lot, and Chinese about a year. I cannot speak to Chinese with only one…
It's important to separate spoken information density from written information density. Some languages win at one while losing at the other. Your arabic example was shorter than the equivalent english on paper, but longer when spoken (4 syllables vs 3).
In terms of information density per syllable, mandarin wins, with english coming in a close second. When speaking, english usually has more syllables per unit time than mandarin, so english has the highest spoken information density of any language. Japanese is the on the opposite end of the spectrum. Despite having the highest syllabic rate, it has the lowest information density.[1]
For written information density, logographic languages win. This is pretty obvious if you've seen a Chinese or Japanese translation of something familiar, such as a Harry Potter book. They're ludicrously thin.
1. See the figures at the end of this paper: http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegri...
Re: Impending kOS
#49>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…
I've worked in many shops that use kdb+ and the ones who really benefit are the ones who bothered to get some training on it rather than those who just assume they'll wing it somehow. Kx themselves have been running great intro workshops for a couple of years now. Some guys at the next desk attended one and came back buzzing with excitement at how they now saw through the noise. So the take away is - if you didn't bother to learn it, stop complaining that you don't understand it. It's not difficult to get when it is explained well, but you're not gonna get it just by staring at it.
Re: Impending kOS
#50Earlier 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…
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