I'm trying to understand "the point." The linked K manuals are from the 1990s. Is this project a way of running legacy code on a modern system? Is there a die-hard group of K enthusiasts who are behind this? Does K have forgotten concepts and / or paradigms that make it worth learning? Are there advantages to K compared to more modern languages / toolkits / frameworks from the past 20 years?
Yes to pretty much all of the above. It's an extremely terse array programming language in the APL family, but with ASCII primitives and strong distributed programming / IPC support. There are also at least a couple companies that still use K3 (I work at one), and no official support from the author (who went on to make other versions of K that are also awesome but completely different).
IMHO the biggest thing holding K back is lack of a production-ready / batteries included open source implementation. (There are a couple nice open source implementations of K but none of them are as feature complete as this one... Plus this one has at least a start on interoperating with .NET)
10 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 28.4 ms ] threadAlso, it's `k` as per Arthur Whitney's website (1).
1. https://k.nyc/
couldn't this have been easier by expanding F#? or were they trying to hit a wider audience with C#?
The FFI loads .NET dll's which could be written in a variety of .NET languages, including F#
IMHO the biggest thing holding K back is lack of a production-ready / batteries included open source implementation. (There are a couple nice open source implementations of K but none of them are as feature complete as this one... Plus this one has at least a start on interoperating with .NET)
not everything that is old is bad
k3 is a refinement of a refinement […] of APL and math notation that is both terse and composable
definitely very much worth learning today
especially if you are interested in data crunching, machine learning, and high performance computing (think GPUs, SIMD, …)
the patterns at the core of k and APL are everywhere, once you get into them you see them everywhere
the world looks different, more rich
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." — Alan Perlis
when you flip it around:
k is worth learning
in the 90s, today, and possibly 100s of years from today