So K is a general purpose programming language? If the claims are true, why don't they submit some entries to the Computer Language Benchmarks Game?
Impending kOS
71–80 of 242 posts
Re: Impending kOS
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Your account was created one day ago, and qfan's 1 hour ago.
Your comment chain is at the top of article linking to a $1800 training course on kdb+, run by the owners of the language.
The article was a good read, if dramatic, but this smells like astroturfing to me.
Re: Impending kOS
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Scrolling doesn't bother me, but unnecessary code does. So long as I can see the algorithm on the screen that's fine. Love the kOS idea, keep on it!
Re: Impending kOS
#74A language/kernel/db/ui to watch. Reading the comments here, it seems the language separates the wheat from the chaff; the average brogrammer won't he able to handle this, but many of us are very interested in exploring.
An OS this small is incredibly exciting to me.
Re: Impending kOS
#75Um, 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 s…
Quote from OA
"Whitney sent Oleg and Pierre some of the C code he was working on, and notes on a problem he didn’t know how to solve. They emailed back a solution, coded in his style."
Did Pierre and Oleg think their solution out in standard code first and then make it Whitney-like, or did they find themselves thinking in Whitneyese straight away? I imagine their teacher may have noticed Whitney tendencies and that is what led to the original encouragement to make contact.
Re: Impending kOS
#76The 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.
So would k be even faster if it were compiled to machine code rather than being interpreted? Would that involve an unacceptable speed versus space trade-off? Or am I missing some crucial reason why k code has to be interpreted?
Re: Impending kOS
#77Googled 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".
Wow, the hipster language prize has been awarded. Other languages go home.
Re: Impending kOS
#78> 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.
Part of what made the internet such a big change to "things" was that it didn't attempt to replace "everything" wholesale. I'm fairly sure that form of the idea was tried -- for example, PC/GEOS -- but the idea that succeeded was the one that allowed the most people to try it out and see what it did.
I'm trying not to add more words to that paragraph, though I could/should.
Re: Impending kOS
#79> 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'm hesitantly excited about this language, after reading this article. The power increase I've gained going from an "OO" imperative mindset to functional has been huge. The simple volume of code from other styles just boggles my mind. I can't understand why people prefer their verbose code with so much edifice. Making another leap like that sounds very promising.
At the same time, it does sound slightly off. What's the catch? In the text editor example, how capable is it? Often, such claims rely on a trick, like saying "" is a text editor in 11 characters. Or the tiny Haskell quicksort that's actually rather inefficient.
I think I'll try playing with it. How long should a Logo interpreter in K be?
Re: Impending kOS
#80>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…
>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.
Yea, I know all about the training and First Derivative. My employer also hired them.
In their defense, every First Derivative KDB+ consultant that I worked with was very sharp and an excellent teacher. They really knew their stuff, and First Derivative is no small part of what has made KDB+ so successful. However, even with their excellent pedagogy, most of my co-workers were totally lost/weren't willing to apply themselves to learn q/kdb+ well.
Here is another way to think about it: many people can't ever get their heads around certain conceptually difficult topics, say, measure theory or quantum physics. I don't think kdb+ is nearly as hard, but it seemed that way looking at my peers who were no slowpokes.