Arthur Whitney is a mad genius. We were an early customer of KX systems and I programmed with KDB for a few years. Arthur Whitney once sat at my desk and helped me debug my code. Very nice guy. Super smart and hilariously knowledgeable about the low level performance of chips, caches, etc. Ask him how many nanoseconds it takes to divide an array of doubles by an array of ints, and he knows. He just knows.
This kind of story is what I enjoy so much about HN. I wish Kdb+ or Shakti had dramatically lower costs for those industries that don't have access to banking cash. I know open source versions exist, but I understand them to mostly be toys and not really production worthy.
As the author of an open source version (https://www.timestored.com/jq/) I wish the same but I fear the time has passed. Two factors:
1. The other technologies are evolving to take parts of kdb+ that made it special quicker than kdb+ is evolving. See arrow / parquet / numpy / kafka, they each solve parts but kdb+ had them all 10 years ago in <2MB.
2. The ratio of learners to advanced programmers has increased every year for the last 20 years. The languages that have gained popularity in that time range are those with the easiest learning curve. Most beginners no longer want to sit with a book frustrated on 2 characters for half a day.
Oh, interesting! I heard other array programmers talking about jq, and (having not seen your website) went off to study the json transformation language, which is also kind of cool, but nothing to do with kdb or q. :)
You are correct. I guess it's more accurate to say, most beginners are no longer forced to learn step by step from a book. Now they ask google/SO/chatGPT and use that if it works with a few tweaks. Kdb+ has very few core concepts, most of which since they are symbols are hard to google.
guys, my two pennies: most beginners have no idea what they want.
but what we know is that what they don’t want is to produce more endless ugly and buggy code into the world - we’ve produced enough of that before they learned how to locate their asse(t)s.
Sure, a fancy calculator that supports rather efficient execution on ridiculously large machine farms. What some people might call the implementation language for a database engine.
Quant firms don't spend millions on what is just "a fancy calculator". It's more than that. It's a high performance combination of programming language and database that are tightly integrated together and more than the sum of their parts. I wouldn't want to write generic software in it, but it's pretty powerful for analysis.
I love kdb but First Derivatives should take it the MongoDb route... Open source it, make it widely available. Build a community around it. Build a package manager. Could be way bigger than it is... But maybe they're happy with their existing business model. I just don't see how you build a moat. Over time new tech will start to takeover as the key innovator is no longer there.
