ectoplasmaboiii

Awesome! I have always wondered if language like spanish and arabic have (widespread) programming languages.

As an aside: I guess the fact that k only uses symbols makes it a very inclusive language :)

For anyone else interested, Tom Leinster (also of Edinburgh Uni) has also written a good short book for beginners:

https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~tl/bct/

I did his course at uni that used this book as a basis and it was great. Tough, but great.

Is anyone here using kdb+/q for data engineering, specifically outside of finance?

Well now I feel like an idiot. Thanks!

The ones that I find myself using a lot

!gm - google maps

!sr/!sro - type in subreddit (add o for old reddit)

!so - stack overflow (i usually use it with [tag])

I don't know if you're already familiar, but pandoc perfectly bridges this gap for me. You can write things in markdown, then covert it latex no problem with pandoc. You can even make templates for it, and write mathmode in markdown.

It certainly makes for less _noisy_ source files in my opinion, and it also means that you get to take advantage of the fact that, if you want to, you can easily convert your markdown to HTML, with maths using something like mathjax.

This was a bit of a ramble, but I honestly can't say enough nice things about pandoc.

I've tried using the vim plugin for VSCode many times, and every time I come back to it, it just feels... off? The actual vim keybindings work fine when you're editing the document, but I find that when you want to use some of the other features of the editor, it becomes a bit more tricky/hacky.

If MS made an official set of vim keybindings that had better editor support, or even if there was some sort of kill switch that let me turn off vim key bindings quickly, I would be 100% sold on VSCode, but until then, I'll stick to the terminal.

I'm personally a fan of remapping jk or jj to esc, there barely any instances in the english language where you would use those two letters together, and it means you can leave insert mode whilst barely moving your hands :D

Apologies dang. Won't happen again.

Hey man, I am from the UK and used to live in the states (north east though, not california). Yes, the quality of food in the USA can be VERY good, especially if you shop at places like wholefoods. The problem tends to be with the cheaper food.

In the UK, I would feel safe eating the cheapest chicken from Tesco, Alsdi, Lidl and ASDA (which is owned by Walmart). Would I feel safe eating chicken from the cheaper supermarkets in the USA? Definitely not.

I don't think the UK should be lecturing other countries, and at no point did I say we should.

Also, how dare you insult fish and chips, half and halfs, and fried mars bars :p

Finally, I would just like to point out that I did say I love the USA, I'm looking at moving back (post-covid). It's one of my favourite countries in the world, but I'm surprised at how controversial it is to say that the food isn't the best.

Sure, we're not great. But it blows my mind that you would ever want to _lower_ the quality of the food you are eating.

And the UK govt wants to lower its food standards to do a trade deal with the states :)

(No offence to any american friends. I love your country, but your food has some problems.)

Interesting posts, looking to make an RSS feeder myself, but in a more bizarre language!

By the way, your personal website (if it's yours) is fantastic. Just the right amount of styling to make it look good.

Would you be willing to share what that vim/kdb plugin was... sounds very interesting!

damn peggy

You might be interested in mesh [1], which is sort of what you're angling at. The creator did a video explaining it [2].

  [1] https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh
  [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEG9pFNYBCI&t=499s

I would also shill one of the APL derivatives. I've gone from a happy Python dev to a die hard k/q guy very quickly. These languages completely change the way you approach a problem.

It's just a shame that q isn't free for commerical use (though it's free for personal use) and there aren't many jobs outside of finance.

You should see the carriages on the glasgow subway... They're tiny!

+1 for radio droid on android, has an alarm clock AND a sleep timer, which seems to be rare on hardware digital radios... (Even BBC sounds doesn't have an alarm clock).

If you also want to find different stations around the world there is also http://www.surfmusic.de/ which I often use for power 105.1FM in nyc, which is difficult to find a stream of here in the UK.

A Ray-Tracer in 7 Lines of K: http://nsl.com/k/ray/ray.k

Not a large K program, but a company I used to work for maintains a large, open source q framework https://github.com/AquaQAnalytics/TorQ which is used in many large investment banks and hedgefunds.

Funnily enough, the framework is actually a more expansive version of a tick system developed by Kx (the company that makes kdb) https://github.com/KxSystems/kdb-tick

The Kx one is incredibly concise. When I first started working with it, it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

The larger K/q programs get, the more they tend to look like "normal" code, but you still see a lot of these clever one liners hidden away in there.

I believe they have fixed it. I just did the following:

  q)a: 1 2 3 0N 3 4
  q)sum a
  13
  q)+/[a]
  13

I'm a bit annoyed that I can't find anywhere to download the language, I would like to try it out.

I'm a q programmer who loves it, but would love to see a language that is: 1. free and open source 2. less symbol heavy than k/q 3. fast enough/safe enough to be used in production

So I'm always on the look out for something new like this that could replace it.