I’ve been using Q (built on K) for Advent of Code. It’s an amazing language that has made me reconsider what a language and programming should be. I come from a FP background and have always considered abstraction the heart of powerful and expressive programming.

In Q, abstraction is wholly unnecessary. Libraries are unnecessary. I can fit the entire language in my head and all code in the language is built out of the fundamental building blocks of it. There’s no layer after layer of abstraction, just a small base of operators and functions.

One might be tempted to compare it to other small languages, like Scheme. But for Scheme it’s intended that you build higher and higher levels of abstractions. With Q it’s both small and compact, and one rarely if ever feels the need to actually build a library of utility functions or anything really: it renders unnecessary the false prophet of code reuse.

I got interested in Q because some of my friends at other financial institutions were using it for HFT and research on historical tick data. I found it surprising at the time I that their software stacks could be so simple, essentially just a single small executable that entirely fit in the CPU cache that managed both the runtime and their entire database. At the time I thought this was impossible, but now I realize how possible and eminently reasonable this was. Instead of Kafka and Redis and SQL Dbs and Kubernetes and god knows what else, you just have Q. No DevOps bullshit, no containers, no complex shit to manage.

In the past 3 weeks I’ve had to rethink my philosophy of what software needs to be and have concluded that most of us are doing things very very wrong: we’ve created this unnecessary world of complexity that is tantamount to masturbation.

Now let’s talk about the language itself. It may look complex, but it’s actually quite simple. The only real data types are lists, dictionaries, symbols, and numbers. And surprisingly, that’s enough. When programming in it I have no desire for classes or objects or trees or whatever, in fact, just using lists and dictionaries can usually solve the problem in a better way.

Also, while Q is interpreted, it’s so goddamn fast. I’ve done some benchmarks against C and Q is about as fast, sometimes even faster. The optimizations the interpreter does are just insane. Not even joking, a single line of Q can accomplish somewhere between 100 to 1000 lines of what the equivalent C code would look like.

Another plus is that editor tooling is unnecessary, I have no need for autocomplete or inline docs because I can literally remember the entire thing. And since Q is so compact, I can view an entire program on a single screen, no scrolling, no jumping between files.

I’ve also noticed that I can remember the verbatim definition of my code. I can almost perfectly remember my exact code for each Advent of Code solution.

Anyways, good luck on Klong, I’m going to check it out. I don’t like J and wish there was a good open source K/Q like language. I don’t actually like K because the overloads on function arity creates a lot of complexity (Q does away with this), so Klong might be right up my alley!

For anyone who hasn’t tried an array based language, I highly recommend it. Q has expanded my mind more than I thought possible at this point in my career. My last really mind expanded experience in programming was when I picked up Scheme and Haskell in high school. And now after using Q, those languages aren’t that great anyways!