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Comment by jonathanhd | Hacker News Reader

If you think this is horrifying you should see what people-who-aren't-Whitney write when they're copying his style, or adding to his codebase.

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I think this is one of the reasons he does not release his code. K is such a small language, with a very limited number of primitives, that were chosen for the task they wanted to solve. Every user would want to change that one he never uses for that one he uses the whole time, so we would have lots of k implementations, each of them with its own mesh of spaghetti code and slightly different behaviors.

Talking for myself, I would love a FOSS version of k, but I am sure as hell I would patch a couple of things, and I am sure I would write much worse code than Whitney's (in his style or in my style).

I think the closest thing is https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona

Kevin Lawler and Scott Locklin (posts on here sometimes) tried to make a tsdb similar to kdb+ called kerf I think. I don't think it worked out, but it would've been nice to have a more affordable competitor.

FWIIW jd is pretty good and is definitely more affordable than Kx or Kerf.

Thanks Scott! I remember reading one of your posts somewhere talking about Jd. I'm curious if you still use it, or if it or your admittedly non-expert J knowledge made sticking with R, Torch7, Lush, Tensorflow...etc more tenable. I figure you might also use Kerf. Speaking on that subject, would you and Kevin ever open-source the code if you're not selling it anymore?

I use jd on my side projects; it's great. J in general is what I invest in for side projects; powerful tool, best user community and decent support for the types of things I need.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll keep that in mind. If you ever get the chance I'd love to read some more J related articles as I find the language weirdly fascinating even though it ain't easy. The community doesn't write a lot of marketing junk either. I've been reading through "J the Natural Language for Analytic Computing" to scratch the itch when it comes up. I'm always impressed when I find that it has things like derivatives as a native primitive.

That's a really badass trick when you look at how it is implemented. Another cool thing to look at is Obverse. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/Inverses

There's a lot of material on their website, though it's not well organized and some of it is out of date.

https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page

I find it rewarding to screw around with, though the only jobs you're gonna get are K/Kx related.

I've heard of obverse, but had forgotten about it. That is neat. Thanks for sharing.

A more up to date version: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok

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