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Impending kOS

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Re: Impending kOS

#51

Post by geocar »

viksit wrote: post #35

The last line of TFA reads like the beginning of some sort of movie in the drama/thriller category. "kOS is coming. Nothing will be the same afterwards." That's what irritated me most. What I'd like to understand is - what led the author to this particular conclusion? Is it the fact that this language is super expressive and concise? Is it that it routinely [1] outperforms its C counterparts even if it ultimately tra…

What you're actually seeing is testimony: people saying they are seeing something amazing, and they aren't very good at explaining what they saw.

Btw: k doesn't translate to C. It's actually a quite simple interpreter. The fact that it outperforms other languages so easily should be saying more about those languages than it should be saying anything about k.

Re: Impending kOS

#52

Post by sohagan857 »

qfan wrote: post #49
kiyoto wrote: 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…

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 bo…

Qfan. Very good comment....I would advise all to read this comment and then follow this link... http://www.firstderivatives.com/kx_training_new.asp

Re: Impending kOS

#53

Post by avmich »

sohagan857 wrote: post #46
sz4kerto wrote: post #41

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.

Ridiculous comment. Have you at least tried q? K? Kdb+?

Yes, interesting. APL was meant to be used for teaching programming - with it's exceptional clarity (sic). Java took the place... J engine is claimed to not have memory leaks - that's from very early versions and being written in C. It's true that it could be hard to think about the problems "vectorally", but still - I agree, the comment sounds ridiculous.

Re: Impending kOS

#54

Post by sz4kerto »

sohagan857 wrote: post #46
sz4kerto wrote: post #41

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.

Ridiculous comment. Have you at least tried q? K? Kdb+?

I've worked with and later run the kdb/q stack for a couple of years at a financial services firm. I certainly enjoyed it but I've also seen the downsides of it, and according to my experience it does not worth the investment, and the biggest reason behind its adoption is A.W.'s relations with the financial industry.

By the way, I really don't want to go into anything personal but your comments represent the attitude around kdb well.

Re: Impending kOS

#55

Post by beagle3 »

geocar wrote: post #34
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #12

> 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…

If I am from another planet, and say I don't know why programs are so big and slow and buggy, and the most complicated program you see I've produced is a glorified calculator, it's too easy to be patronising and say well, that's because you haven't done anything complicated . However if I then show you a programming language, a database engine (similar in capability to SQL but around 1000x faster), a graphical deskto…

I think Douglas Adams' SEP[0] field is a good description of this. Most people ignore what doesn't fit with their logic - doubly so if fitting it in would show them that they have been wrong/wasted money/wasted time in the past. (The Upton Sinclair quote about "it's difficult for someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it" is also relevant).

It's that way with religion, paradigms in medicine, and even chemistry/crystallography (see e.g. Shechtman vs Pauling[1]). It's human nature.

It is also worth pointing out that while this specific version of K is new, K itself is 20, and it is mostly purified APL, itself over 60 years old. People have been ignoring this since forever (APL found stellar success in the OR community in the 70s and 80s on its own, in trading floors in the 80s and 90s thanks to Arthur Whitney, but has since mostly disappeared)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem#Ficti...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/06/dan-shechtman...

Re: Impending kOS

#57

Post by ah- »

rgbrgb wrote: post #47

Kind of curious to play around with that text editor. Any chance of K running on OSX?

You can get kdb+ for free from here: http://kx.com/software-download.php

However, they've been working on a new version of k that's not publicly available yet and I suppose the kparc stuff requires that.

Re: Impending kOS

#58

Post by avmich »

calinet6 wrote: post #16
beagle3 wrote: 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…

You owe to yourself to read the Iverson's Turing lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought". You can find it. Apparently APL family can claim relationship to math notation - which is not a small claim. Lisp family does it too - in different way.

Re: Impending kOS

#59

Post by sz4kerto »

beagle3 wrote: post #14
outside1234 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an understatement. If we are allowed code like this, I can write an editor in ONE line of JavaScript. :)

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

Why do you exclude textarea? It's a high-level functionality available in JS. That q code uses the high-level functionality of q. What's the difference?

Re: Impending kOS

#60

Post by beagle3 »

geocar wrote: post #37
dang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the research literature on software development has consistently found that code size is the best measurement of complexity and predictor of error rates. (Sorry I don't have citations handy but we've discussed this many times on HN, and there's a recent study in the book "Making Software" that adds to it.) What's interesting is how strongly this goes against what most people think they know about good programmin…

If someone produces smaller and faster code than me, then I should want to learn from it. I wonder why other people have the exact opposite reaction. Why do you think that is?

I don't understand it either. But it happens everywhere, not just in code. Most people are only interested in the "truth" and "facts" as long as it fits within their existing world view.

And things like K rarely do.

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