That's indeed surprising. The main site of the organization (not sure what to call them) does show the history and relationship to Iverson, APL and J: https://kparc.io/
This looks really cool but what is the real use case for it? If I have no graphics, no easy way to serve HTTP resources and no other weird/niche use cases, what can I use k for outside of academic and financial applications?
Don't get me wrong I think this looks very interesting and I'd love to use it but I wanna use it for real software and I don't see how k makes that easier for me compared to popular widespread languages.
"Most programmers will agree that this expression makes perfect sense, but if you show it to a math guy, be ready to hear "no, it isn't". And once you see what makes him think that way, you will also see why we assign values with : in k."
This is pretty dumb. Show "x : x + 1" or even "x : y + 1" to a math person and they will not know what you mean either. There is a non-universal convention in math of using a "defining semicolon" with equals signs, so you could say "x := y + 1" and math people would probably interpret it the same way you do, though they might not like "x := x + 1".
But all this is irrelevant anyway: Progamming is not math. Other parts of the syntax of k don't look very mathy either. Preferring ":" over "=" or something else for assignment is a choice on the part of the language designers, but it has nothing to do with not confusing poor mathematicians.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 21.5 ms ] threadDon't get me wrong I think this looks very interesting and I'd love to use it but I wanna use it for real software and I don't see how k makes that easier for me compared to popular widespread languages.
This is pretty dumb. Show "x : x + 1" or even "x : y + 1" to a math person and they will not know what you mean either. There is a non-universal convention in math of using a "defining semicolon" with equals signs, so you could say "x := y + 1" and math people would probably interpret it the same way you do, though they might not like "x := x + 1".
But all this is irrelevant anyway: Progamming is not math. Other parts of the syntax of k don't look very mathy either. Preferring ":" over "=" or something else for assignment is a choice on the part of the language designers, but it has nothing to do with not confusing poor mathematicians.