The author of Kdb is Arthur Whitney. He is another extreme programmer who has had a huge influence on fintech and made boat loads of cash I would presume.
Just want to say that it's awesome to see Rebol/Red and K mentioned in a comment thread about Chuck Moore.
It's interesting because Rebol and K have almost totally opposite philosophies about how software should be structured. K emphasizes flat namespaces and leans heavily on the primitives and only a handful of functions. Rebol encourages writing DSLs to fit the language to the problem.
But despite different philosophies, they both allow incredible programmer productivity. I think a lot of this productivity comes from adherence to "Do not speculate!" and therefore not having a bunch of non-useful functionality or boilerplate for the end-user programmer to have to manage.
Agreed. Very different, yet similar philosophies if you squint hard enough. Aaron Hsu did an AMA on here and put it on YouTube showing his GPU compiler for APL code written in APL. The entire thing is maybe 5-10 pages of one-liners and looks darn elegant to me. During his lengthy talk on HN he shows you don't need zillions of abstractions if you can keep all the code in a few screens. He uses Notepad (not Notepad++ even) as an editor too. To me, in a way that makes sense as having to use a gargantuan IDE to manage your gargantuan code base seems wrong on some level. Forth users just take that sentiment one step further and only even include the primitives in their language that they need.
He also helped in the development of J with Roger Hui and Ken Iverson, the creator of APL, by writing a one page interpreter for J over an afternoon or two. I am always drawn to prototyping and writing solutions in J. I am not a web developer, but for mathematics and statistics, it is amazing. I've always wondered how similar and different K and J are on a deep level, but I have always stuck with J.
Yes; see the 5th-last paragraph of http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320 for a concrete answer to this. (Getting to said paragraph by way of all the paragraphs before it is, of course, highly recommended.)
Yes, I'm mad that the subject of the above URL is still, to quote the article, "dark."
