kdb VS Kbd

> let's say I have a finance team that have never heard of it - why might they be interested?

In my experience it's very good at quickly developing real-time analytics applications with only a small set of developers. A couple of q developers can develop, maintain and operate the server side of 5 or 6 separate applications without breaking a sweat. Changes come in at a high speed too.

It's a highly interactive language. A bit like a lisp, you start up a q process, open a port and then you iterate and update your application live without needing to restart. Typically on our projects we've had a well iterated program running in QA for a day or 2 before opening a PR (which becomes more of a formality for getting the solution to the problem into prod at that stage).

The q language itself is quite wordy. Check the reference page: https://code.kx.com/q/ref/ Many programs written in q consist mainly of the key words with the special operators interspersed. Also see some example libraries: https://github.com/finos/kdb

It's been a fairly stable language to work with, having few breaking changes between successive versions. q code written 8/9/10 years ago on older versions will most likely still run the same today. We have source code on one project at work which hasn't had a code change in 6 years now (despite moving through different versions 2.8->3.0->3.3->3.5->4.0) and it runs daily without a hiccup.

Mostly it's a joy working with it because I feel like I get to tell the computer what I want it to do, without also having to tell it how to do it.

Should you wish to type them on a normal keyboard:

https://abrudz.github.io/lb/apl has a browser bookmarklet which adds an APL language bar to the top of any web page so you can type in any input box with backtick prefixes.

https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd has a Windows Input Method Editor (IME) that adds system-wide RightAlt+letter combos.

:d) https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd

I use setxkbmap -layout us,apl -variant ,dyalog -option grp:switch on Linux and https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd on Windows.

This might have been true a couple of years ago but it is totally untrue now.

I'm not sure why you couldn't use the student version of Dyalog? Sounds like it would have been fine. There are also many more FOSS implementations of array languages now, such as ngn/k and April. https://github.com/phantomics/april

'only available for Linux' - not true https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd/ and others (also different input modes like `w for ⍵)

'no community support' - on the contrary there is a big and helpful APL community https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums that is (imo) more useful than stackoverflow

'Dynamic scoping...' - Dyalog's (and other APL's) dfns have lexical scope.

'The language is extremely terse' - is this meant to be a bad thing?

'The code tends to be very hacky' - maybe if you write bad code or try and write C in APL (it won't work)

In general programming I like to use a keyboard layout which allows typing APL glyphs with Right Alt: https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd