ngn-k-tutorial VS kdb

Complain about the language or documentation, but array language communities are absolutely friendly to outsiders! This tutorial lists some active forums, give them a try:

https://github.com/razetime/ngn-k-tutorial/tree/main?tab=rea...

Also, have to shout out the APL Orchard, where Adám will give any visitor a personal tutorial: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/52405/the-apl-orchard

To add to the list, this one is pretty good;

https://github.com/razetime/ngn-k-tutorial

If you like APL, then you probably want to try K, which is an ASCII-only array language with a focus on guided minimalism. For an open source K you can try ngn/k, which has a tutorial.

Razetime's matmul refactoring is brilliant: https://github.com/razetime/ngn-k-tutorial/blob/main/c-think...

Finally, some nice examples of k's concision:

  qs:{$[2>#?x;x;,/qs'x@&'~\:x<*1?x]}    / Quicksort

> 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.