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K and Software Engineering (reddit.com)
21 points by silentbicycle on May 3, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



I reckon a good number of us could be K5 refugees.. but for the remaining, here's a nice overview of what K is capable of:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/12/21757/8647

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/4/12/21757/8647/33#33

There're responses posted in various languages, for comparison.

I played with it for a while, but the brevity is a little daunting. To me at least, a 100 line C# program and a 4 line K script takes equal amount of time to parse.


My dad uses J in his work (very similar to K), and it makes my head hurt just looking at it. It's all ^^$:#//;"'3 or something...

He also makes junkloads of money with his J programs, so there's that.


I've heard that K is used a bit in the finance industry; is J in a similar position?


I'm not sure if it is generally, but he does use it for finance.


Thanks.


I've done some first steps in J and it's really mind blowing. It's hard to get into it and you have to learn a lot before you can read programs. (Since I had too little practice, I can't read it.) But the underlying concepts are not too difficult, even to someone like me with not-so-good math knowledge.

I bought the e-book version of "Fractals, Visualization and J" by Cliff Reiter to improve my understanding. It's only ~7€ at lulu.com and I bought if to learn more about the impressive visualizations possible with J.


Wow, that's a lot of hot air. Show me the code of a real-world K application and then let's see. Preferably something that doesn't just do data mining, e.g. a K version of the Java Pet Store.

Once you actually have to communicate the results of your clever algorithms, things look slightly different.

The APL languages seem very suited to the constraints of the finance industry, but that doesn't necessarily transfer a lot to other fields (number-heavy science might benefit, too. But why would you write GMail in J/K/A+?)


http://nsl.com/ (start with the "Tools" heading and go down).

A spreadsheet that works in 2 lines, and one that's significantly nontrivial in 20. A database that works in 14 lines. A chat server. a 15-puzzle game. Eliza. A simplifier for algebraic expressions.

All of them in extremely concise code, that you are going to ignore with a SEP field.

You're welcome.


Thanks. I do have to say that most of the programs you mentioned didn't exactly help me get a better view of semi-large-scale projects in K, the Krav Maga tracker is at least a step in the proper direction (non-trivial GUI, configuraiton, storing and reading data etc.). I'll work through that after work a bit...


So, Java is just good for UI and I/O? that's hardly a praise.


Java's not even good for that. But the Pet Store has been used in previous comparisons, e.g. when C#/.NET first arrived. But take any application that has to communicate with other systems and/or users, and terse algorithms and vector commands appear less significant.

I'm not saying that once you're doing an application in this field it doesn't matter what language you use. Quite to the contrary, but quite likely we're looking at different language features here. Modularization, macros and other means to structure your code. I'd honestly like to see how the modern APL derivatives handle that.


http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8cckg/arthur_wh...

It doesn't appear to be all good news over there.

Nevertheless, I have added this to my ever-expanding "things to further investigate" list.




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