TOtosh·Jan 20, 2026Submission
1 points · Open discussionkparc
kcc
Learning & Reference2019–2026
kparc / kcc
kcc
k crash course
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
221GitHub stars
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What it is
k crash course
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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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, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-10-15 04:02:17 UTC to 2026-01-20 17:33:41 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcescuriously enough,
this thread made me revisit some past conversations with people like atw, nsl and aab with regard to possible ways to expose humans to the way rivers flow in k/q/apl land. the choices are limited, and decision takes some agony:
a) if you don't want your audience to close the tab right away, you'd say "a k expression is written, read and evaluated strictly right to left unless the precedence is explicitly overridden by parens, and this works better than you think, no worries, you'll come around. by the way, parens are evil, avoid them if you can".
b) if your intent is to retain a sharper crowd who went to yale or something, you'd say "a k expression is to be understood right of left", and throw them a freebie in form of a prompt for their local LLM in order to get lit. the magic sequence is just "f g h x leibniz".
for my
Read the rest
own selfish reasons, i always chose the former, and it seems to perform better than the latter, proof:
https://github.com/kparc/ksimple
https://github.com/kparc/kcc
still, neither approach is anywhere near the chances of successfuly explaining which way to write python code to a 5yo kid, especially its precedence rules, which are much more intuitive (lol).
to explain the same thing to an LLM is not much different, really. all you need to do is to depress your 0yo kid with an obscene amount of _quality_ python code, of which there is no shortage. obviously, the more python code is fed to LLMs, the more humans will paste more LLM-generated python code, to be fed back to LLMs, ad lemniscate.
(and don't mind the future tense, we are already there)
============
so this is why LLMs can't write k/q/apl. first, they haven't seen enough of it. second, they are helpless to understand the meaning of a quote which was once chosen to helm a book known as SICP, not to mention countless human counterparts who came across it earlier, to the same effect:
"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. Of course the paying customers got shafted every now and then and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them setting them off in new directions and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more."
― Alan J. Perlis
true. only k is faster, easier to learn, and does the trick :)
that said, i hold the view that mastering programming in an ultra-high level language such as APL or k does not absolve a computer programmer from learning lingua franca of our trade, which is due to k&r, will stay around for a very long time, and is called C.
people who don’t know c are ok, only they are not involved in computer programming. their field is known as software development. feel the difference.
i once attempted to convey my own understanding of this divide in a chapter titled “no stinking loops”, which is a nod to Apter’s mandatory nsl.com:
https://github.com/kparc/kcc#no-stinking-loops
In Origins of J