I am waiting to see what becomes of Arthur Whitney's Desktop and Server OS based upon his language K5/K6.
KDB+/Q (database and language) is a small download, but is very powerful.
I had heard of Inferno and Plan9, but aside from some YouTube videos and links, I never really looked it over or took it for a drive. I'll have to check this out; after all, it's amazing what nuggets are buried in the recent past of CS.
Here's some timing tests done in various languages (C, Java, Perl, Tcl, and others) in 1998 compared with Inferno [3]. Brian W. Kernighan of K&R fame was one of the author's at Bell Labs!
And here's a comparison to Arthur Whitney's K language, I believe not too long after using the same code to compare with K on a 100MHz Pentium [4]. K is significantly faster and shorter in LOC.
The tests were mainly loops, text and stdio. APL derived languages like A+, K, J, or Q don't usually do loops, they are better with binary, and memory-mapped files, but K did very well in the benchmarks despite those factors.
As attractive are kx's claimed numbers, you'd need to be a highly motivated company to embrace it. The single character for everything culture is impenetrable and unreadable, thus very high bar for maintenance at the organization level.
Just providing readers with a different take on things: I've been coding in K professionally, after coming from a C-heavy (not functional-programming!) background, for about three months. It only took a few hours with the language to have the apparent line-noise make sense, and after a few weeks I could decipher the function of most snippets I see.
There are great reasons why a dev team might not want to switch over to K for its operations (or switch languages at all, really), but seeing K in action, I have to respectfully disagree that readability and maintainability are those reasons.
I've followed a lot of arguments over the accessibility of k and I'd say what it boils down to is that like Lisp or Forth, for a passionate few, it just fits how they think, and for the rest it doesn't. I tried it for a while, but found the paradigm too rigid for general purpose programming. Also, I got tired of the mental effort it took to read/write code where every line is as readable as a long regex.
> very high bar for maintenance at the organization level.
First, it's much easier to learn k/q on a good enough level than learning C. Second, this apparent bar has a nice effect on the salary you can get for it.
Given his predilections, I guess the austerity of the language will be reflected in the user interface, too. So my bet is that this won't be a new Oberon, QNX or Inferno, but closer to ColorForth.
I had heard of Inferno and Plan9, but aside from some YouTube videos and links, I never really looked it over or took it for a drive. I'll have to check this out; after all, it's amazing what nuggets are buried in the recent past of CS.
Here's some timing tests done in various languages (C, Java, Perl, Tcl, and others) in 1998 compared with Inferno [3]. Brian W. Kernighan of K&R fame was one of the author's at Bell Labs!
And here's a comparison to Arthur Whitney's K language, I believe not too long after using the same code to compare with K on a 100MHz Pentium [4]. K is significantly faster and shorter in LOC.
The tests were mainly loops, text and stdio. APL derived languages like A+, K, J, or Q don't usually do loops, they are better with binary, and memory-mapped files, but K did very well in the benchmarks despite those factors.
[1] http://kparc.com/
[2] https://kx.com/
[3] https://9p.io/cm/cs/who/bwk/interps/pap.html
[4] http://kparc.com/z/bell.k