K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
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K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
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Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#2I had to write a lot of K at university (thus disclosing where I went to, and confusing people that have written any K with the idea you could possibly write a lot of it).
Get by the symbolic confusion (Arthur himself used to respond to confused students on the mailing list about such things) and it's really quite inspired. I can appreciate how an APL with proper symbols would be properly productive. Your code ends up super dense, with non-trivial stuff easily fitting on just a few screens, so you can keep track of what's going on. (KDB itself, the commercial column based DB product built with K, was notoriously small for the functionality). The real pain I seem to recall was interfacing it with anything else, but the entire environment is tiny.
This is one of those languages that really expanded my mind and made me hope the rest of the world would one day revisit the ideas of the APL family.
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#3I had to write a lot of K at university (thus disclosing where I went to, and confusing people that have written any K with the idea you could possibly write a lot of it). Get by the symbolic confusion (Arthur himself used to respond to confused students on the mailing list about such things) and it's really quite inspired. I can appreciate how an APL with proper symbols would be properly productive. Your code ends u…
Is Kona good enough for dabbling with do you think?
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#4We use a lot Q (K's kind of successor) and kdb+ at work pretty daunting at first but the performance is amazing.
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#5For a real eye opener compare the length of these K versions of the Alioth benchmarks to their more verbose brethren http://kparc.com/$/z/comp.k.
I found these on the K OS project page - http://kparc.com/os.htm. There's a great description of Arthur Whitney building a Notepad like text editor (1K) in 30 minutes or so using this system here - http://coding-is-like-cooking.info/2013/09/an-introduction-t....
Personally K is a bit too terse for my tastes - I think something like Nile achieves some of the terseness of APL without looking like line noise - http://github.com/damelang/nile/blob/master/examples/text-la....
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#6For a real eye opener compare the length of these K versions of the Alioth benchmarks to their more verbose brethren http://kparc.com/$/z/comp.k . I found these on the K OS project page - http://kparc.com/os.htm . There's a great description of Arthur Whitney building a Notepad like text editor (1K) in 30 minutes or so using this system here - http://coding-is-like-cooking.info/2013/09/an-introduction-t... . Personal…
a quick Internet also reveals:
life:{3=a-x*4=a:2{+(0+':x)+1_x,0}/x}
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#7I have a really hard time understanding what APL-likes are useful for. I guess I don't do a lot of stuff with big vectors, but I feel like it would be hard to structure code (maybe you don't need to?)
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#8K's successor Q is used heavily in financial systems and costs a bomb. Despite all the big data rage these days, I think Q has been handling very high volumes of data for a while now with some amazing performance.
The 32-bit trial version of kdb+ is available for non-commercial use [1], so I went and downloaded it. The linux zip download is 278KB. Uh ok! I was expecting it to download more stuff (much like Chrome's installation), but nope, that's all there is to it!
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#9I used K and KDB full-time from around 2003-2005. Very, very good performance, but very steep learning curve and some frustrating bugs, but getting quick direct support from Arthur helped a lot (even if his emails were frustratingly terse! ). What else do you expect from a guy whose email address was a@kx.com? It forced me to learn functional programming before it was "in". Once you got the way to think about vectors and functions over vectors you could be very productive chopping up big data in finance. Fun stuff actually.
Re: K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)
#10NumPy is an array oriented library/language too. Idiomatic NumPy usage is quite terse too. I can see how you can start with NumPy like syntax and then want something still more terse, but starting from K/Q seems quite hard.