kdb VS aoc2017

> 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.

In case you've jumped straight to the comments, here are some 'intro' links. Many of these also appear in ngn/k's readme.

First, direct links to ngn/k in the browser:

- REPL: https://ngn.bitbucket.io/k/#r

- editor: https://ngn.bitbucket.io/k/

Second, the best one-stop shop for an overview of k6's primitives (both ngn/k and oK are based on k6). https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok/blob/gh-pages/docs/Manual....

The best k intro examples are in John Earnest's k editor iKe - there's a dropdown at the bottom right. http://johnearnest.github.io/ok/ike/ike.html

ngn/k's editor also has an 'examples' dropdown in its menu.

Next, some Advent of Code solutions, to show that k doesn't have to look like a mass of meaningless symbols: https://github.com/chrispsn/aoc2017/blob/main/answers.k

For an illustration of k's strengths,