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by LessDmesg
2289 days ago
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I have the same question for K aficionados as I have for Forth ones: what real-world, human-usable, important software has been written in it? A GUI framework, a web browser, a window manager, a text editor, etc. Anything? I'm asking because the article is poking at C-like languages, i.e. implying that K is good for general-purpose use. Yet all I hear about is that K is good at multiplying numbers and matrices, which is a pretty limited playground. |
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OpenFirmware (previously seen in Power Macs, pretty much every Sun device until Sun died, so on.
Canon Cat (greatest text editor of all time, by Jef Raskin, the guy who made the Macintosh)
Forth Has Been to Space (multiple times, but who's keeping score?): https://www.forth.com/resources/space-applications/
OKAD, which was used to create the processor with the lowest power usage per instruction in the entire world.
k:
Important, no, but a substantial volume of stuff. Text editors, GUIs, window managers, operating system completely independent of any other, a pretty important and very expensive database, so on.
k, unlike Forth, came after software was seen as IP. Software as IP has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
k's ancestor, APL, was used in quite a few things quite elegantly, and while k is different, it's not different enough to be a different paradigm. Some examples: first practical electronic mail system, first widely-used electronic mail system (used for Carter's successful Presidential campaign, for example), first worldwide computer network, I could go on.
That k hasn't seen as much groundbreaking work done in it is less because of the language itself and more because of the insane costs, trigger-happy lawyers of kx, and money.
Of course, when you asked this of Forth the other day, you were trolling ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319154 ), so I imagine I might be wasting my time.