Well I have been interested in programming languages for a very long time. I was hired into a group at Morgan Stanley specifically to develop this project. We had some initial use-cases where some internal trading systems could be "hot patched" with new logic but it was very slow (there was basically a simple AST-walking interpreter here). So at first I just had to make a roughly equivalent thing that could be much faster. However once that immediate need was satisfied, we found many more interesting places to apply this tool. I would say that the storage and live data-analysis features are just as valuable as the efficient machine code produced by hobbes.

Yes I have used kdb/q before. It's pretty popular in the financial domain. I really like what we can do with type systems. :D

Getting this project open sourced was really accomplished by other folks who I'm not sure if I can name here (I will check with them) but I was very happy to help make it happen. There are several folks internally who have been working really hard to make it possible for the firm to open source the work that we do and hobbes is just one part of that effort. There are several folks in management positions in the firm who have made open source efforts like this a priority and have even gone out on a limb to make sure that this happens. Morgan Stanley is a really remarkable company in the technology/finance domain, in my experience.

I'd like to know this as well. I know most array languages coupled with a DB aren't as fast as a language with a JIT, but the code is quite expressive. If Kdb+ can ever easily be run on an FPGA or GPU cluster...that would be something.