KUkuwze·Dec 12, 2017
On github kiyoto worked on this project[0] to help others understand Q code.
[0]: https://github.com/kiyoto/ungod
In The Q Languagekiyoto
ungod
HISTORICAL RECORD2014–2017
kiyoto / ungod · Not publicly available
ungod
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3Distinct people
3Mentions
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What it is
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-10-18 22:40:35 UTC to 2017-12-12 19:57:17 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesWhile I really like K/Q/J/APL (some of this is Stockholm Syndrome: I spent the first 3 years of my career writing K/Q at a trading firm, eventually becoming the human debugger for my team's K/Q "investment". It got so annoying that I worked on a little parser library to help me debug: https://github.com/kiyoto/ungod), they are doomed from a adoption/future viability point of view.
1. Steep learning curve without benefits: APLs like K/Q/J optimize for concision to the point of unreadability. Sure, it might be fun to decipher clever K/Q one-liners, but if you have to do it everyday for work in production, it's just exhausting. This lack of readability has limited adoption and the growth of its user community. For any technology is to have a viable community, it needs to be usable by a critical mass. K/Q in specific but APLs in general never
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had that, especially with more user-friendly alternatives like R/Matlab for scientific computing.
2. No open source community. There's Kona (https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona) by Kevin Lawler, but again, its community has been small because the underlying language is not design to be usable by enough people.
3. Domain specificity of array languages: These days, array languages are just too limited in its scope. Scientific computing, the bread and butter of any array programming language, has been made possible in other languages (ex: Python), making array languages not powerful nor compelling enough to use because most of its strengths can be found in other languages and its weaknesses are too crippling.
I heard that Arthur Whitney found his successors (a pair of Russian programmers from St. Petersburg, iirc), so K/Q will likely to be around beyond his retirement. That said, I think its user base will continue to shrink for above reasons.
I totally agree. That's why I wrote a parser for the language to help me and my coworkers debug =) https://github.com/kiyoto/ungod
As I commented above, the syntax is horrible. But I still think it is an effective tool for certain problems.
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