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Programming in K

42 points| tosh | 3 days ago |github.com

8 comments

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chrisaycock|3 hours ago

I first encountered q/kdb+ at a quant job in 2007. I learned so much from the array semantics about how to concisely represent time-series logic that I can't imagine ever using a scalar language for research.

Fun fact: the aj (asof join) function was my inspiration for pandas.merge_asof. I added the extra parameters (direction, tolerance, allow_exact_matches) because of the limitations I kept hitting in kdb.

https://code.kx.com/q/ref/aj/

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.merge_as...

leprechaun1066|1 hour ago

The aj function at its heart is a bin (https://code.kx.com/q/ref/bin/) search between the two tables, on the requested columns, to find the indices of the right table to zip onto the left table.

  aj[`sym`time;t;q]
becomes

  t,'(`sym`time _q)(`sym`time#q)bin`sym`time#t
The rest of the aj function internals are there to handle edge cases, handling missing columns and options for filling nulls.

A lot of the joins can be distilled to the core operators/functions in a similar manner. For example the plus-join is

  x+0i^y(cols key y)#x

koolala|1 hour ago

I wish there was a language like K that worked with single precision floats. Would be great to use with graphics.

ksherlock|1 hour ago

q is like k and has single precision floats.

monster_truck|25 minutes ago

K fucking rules if you're trying to minmax a game or balance your own.

Figuring out things like "what percentage of the time will my starting hand contain the cards I need for my deck to function, and if it doesn't, how many mulligans will it take" will basically ruin competitive MTG for you. I used to buy physical verisons of the decks I made it to top 500 with in Arena, stopped because it wasn't a fun challenge anymore (and lost all interest when they started dragging other IPs in, they'll never get another cent from me)

jjtheblunt|1 hour ago

the github repo linked, under "manual.md", has a link which redirects to malware, such as that ostensibly to "k6".