As someone who does not know what k4, qSQL, or q are, reading through the landing page of this website was giving me mild schizophrenia. And then I tried to search for these things in the old way, and received incredibly dry technical sites that still don’t tell me what it is, and all these names are wildly SEO unfriendly. So I had Claude give me context and it’s apparently the database Wall Street uses for tick data. Sounds cool but, jeez.
K4 is the K programming language, Q is a language built on top of K. They are the practical over achieving members of the array family of programming languages.
Why did I have to see this mysterious and intriguing code in the morning, now my brain won't rest until I learn what every symbol means and how it works. Thanks for sharing!
Comments
As someone who does not know what k4, qSQL, or q are, reading through the landing page of this website was giving me mild schizophrenia. And then I tried to search for these things in the old way, and received incredibly dry technical sites that still don’t tell me what it is, and all these names are wildly SEO unfriendly. So I had Claude give me context and it’s apparently the database Wall Street uses for tick data. Sounds cool but, jeez.
K4 is the K programming language, Q is a language built on top of K. They are the practical over achieving members of the array family of programming languages.
shoutout to bryan @bcantrill who I think explained K best at https://youtu.be/2wZ1pCpJUIM?si=y4ugbFXroTZc22AY&t=471 and https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242
Algol derivatives usually written by, commercialized, then sold by Arthur Whitney. Generally considered write-only :)
Algol?
Did you mean APL?
Yes, yes I did. As penance, I will post Whitney’s sudoku solver in k:
Why did I have to see this mysterious and intriguing code in the morning, now my brain won't rest until I learn what every symbol means and how it works. Thanks for sharing!
https://nsl.com/papers/denial.html
I believe k and q are member of the "array programming"/APL family of languages who are exceptionally terse/information-dense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_programming
EDIT: Did someone downvoted this because it is wrong or is someone I am arguing with rage-downvoted this ?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ quants be minimal