[xwolfi]

Isn't Q the language, and Kx the company ?

I have to use it at work, helping quants try to actually maintain production code rather than just vomit horrible one-time scripts they patch together in an endless stream of layers on top of layers.

This thing should be banned. Everything is one-letter, it's impossible to Google, it takes the opposite decision of every imaginable convention, I have yet to see someone who can read his own stuff 2 weeks later. Notwithstanding free tools to query force-expire every 3 months (QPad grrr) and as you said it's so closed they have to take webdevs like me to just help them maintain it all eventually.

It's risky for the bank (and we're not a small one :s), it's expensive for the programmer, and it's misery for the quants (but they all feel like geniuses spending weeks on simple stuff on kdb, so their misery is only in people looking at them wasting away their brain like that).

[tluyben2]

> but they all feel like geniuses spending weeks on simple stuff on kdb

They are not experienced in the environment then? It is not that hard. Sure it is spartan as the tooling is not what you expect in 2021, but this seems a bit over the top?

> I have yet to see someone who can read his own stuff 2 weeks

http://nsl.com/ can, years later even (as can I but he has an impressive portfolio which makes it obvious).

[rak1507]

Why is it still used then? Are there just no good alternatives? Or legacy reasons?

[beagle3]

On the things it does well - being a memory mapped column store, it hardly had any competition a few years ago (clickhouse might be getting there these days, perhaps)

And if your fluent in K, one-of scripts and queries are significantly shorter and easier to get right.

But it is not good as a general purpose language in a commercial setting - not because of the language itself which is fine if a bit spartan - but because it is hard to find people who are willing and able to work with it.

Much like its predecessor APL, it’s a tool for thought more than a tool for implementation.

[tluyben2]

I think many people would work in it, but the job market for it is limited and driven by who knows who as far as I noticed. I hope Shakti will make things better: so far it's nice and definitely it's pricepoint is a lot better. Not sure where it will go.

[rak1507]

How do you know the price point is better? It's not on the website. Are you a customer?

[rak1507]

Yeah I personally really like array langs so I was just wondering why other people don't.

[gpderetta]

You are right. As far as I understand Q is K plus the additional sql-like syntax.

And yes, it is nigh-unreadable. I have yet to learn it, but I think there is value in succinctness at least for throwaway scripts.

[tluyben2]

If you use k a lot, you start to automatically recognize idioms/stanzas; it just becomes automatic to recognize a group of chars. And then it becomes readable. The throwaway nature, in my experience and opinion, comes not from it being unreadable (as many people who never used languages like this seem to think), but rather from the fact that the code you are are changing is so short that thinking it up and typing it in (by combining idioms) is faster than placing your cursor and actually editing existing code. Also you are on a repl or editor that can run code on the cursor, so interactive development even makes that case stronger: before you know it, you have produced a new version of a function without actually even looking at the old one.

For a nice intro, read Nils' excellent book: https://www.t3x.org/klong/book.html it even has an idioms table in the back.

[xwolfi]

Yeah but there s low value in throwaway, and it's not succint, it's 1-letter. ONE lol, for every imaginable labguage keyword.

For instance to parse a binary encoded dictionary from a table column: -9!'columnName(I remember it because it s the first time I spent a day on something so useless yet so indispensible yet so fucked up). I challenge you to google it.

He likes succint hihihi.