> With most of the array languages, it is commercial, so I'd be cautious about building a business around it
K/Kdb/q seems very happy with this state of affairs, which is really strange: if they O/S'd it I could see a lot of goodwill/mindshare going their way, but I think their Morgan Stanley roots view O/S as commie nonsense. Meanwhile, it's definitely viewed as legacy in the bulge-bracket banks that use it b/c it's so hard to hire for, not to mention its limited applications for teams (kdb is NOT a good multi-user database). However elegant it may be, it's doomed to be a COBOL if this is where its main userbase stays.
J is open source, but I can't get a handle on how battle-tested it is. It always seemed like Kdb was the real product that got used in anger.
Personally I think array-heads should spend more time with Haskell, since it has the ability to be massively terse and point-free, has type inference, loves infix gobbledygook, can be tuned for great performance, and is thoroughly open-source.
K/Kdb/q seems very happy with this state of affairs, which is really strange: if they O/S'd it I could see a lot of goodwill/mindshare going their way
It's not too hard to grok: if they freed it, they'd lose money. $200,000,000 in revenue last year from Kx alone. Goodwill compared to cash, executive picks cash every time.
I have no idea what Shakti's doing, but they, too, are probably making a substantial amount of money.
> I have no idea what Shakti's doing, but they, too, are probably making a substantial amount of money.
I'd think AW would be more concerned about legacy and impact than just $$$ at this point -- tradetech has long stopped being a significant source of innovation in computer science as it's essentially iterating on the same problemset from the 00s.
OTOH I suppose having a small cult has its benefits, as opposed to actually giving something to the larger world, O/S isn't exactly a cakewalk.
This is the annoying thing about this software niche. I have zero information on Shakti. Their website just says some buzzwords and has a contact link. You can download it as an anaconda package or something, but I don't understand the license.
I'm not an expert in either language, but have played with both and APL is much easier to experiment with and less hard for me to grok than Haskell. Both have REPLs, but there is a lot of additional ceremony with Haskell (for good and bad). I don't see a huge amount of the APL crowd going to Haskell. Yeah it has terse operators and points-free, but it is more the sum of the whole kind of thing.
I agree and don't mean to imply Haskell has an out-of-the-box K/APL experience. More that with it's syntactic flexibility, one can imagine offering a k-like DSL/library in Haskell which would then give you access to its ecosystem, freely distributable apps, etc.
No problem and I like you're thinking, but honestly just want a free and open source APL or K language that is part of a lightweight download (a few MB) that can also create zero install executables that bundle the interpreter. There are a lot of toy projects out there, but nothing really close to what I want. I'd build it myself if I had the time and was significantly more talented :).
K/Kdb/q seems very happy with this state of affairs, which is really strange: if they O/S'd it I could see a lot of goodwill/mindshare going their way, but I think their Morgan Stanley roots view O/S as commie nonsense. Meanwhile, it's definitely viewed as legacy in the bulge-bracket banks that use it b/c it's so hard to hire for, not to mention its limited applications for teams (kdb is NOT a good multi-user database). However elegant it may be, it's doomed to be a COBOL if this is where its main userbase stays.
J is open source, but I can't get a handle on how battle-tested it is. It always seemed like Kdb was the real product that got used in anger.
Personally I think array-heads should spend more time with Haskell, since it has the ability to be massively terse and point-free, has type inference, loves infix gobbledygook, can be tuned for great performance, and is thoroughly open-source.