K is a proprietary array processing language developed by Arthur Whitney and commercialized by Kx Systems. The language serves as the foundation for kdb, an in-memory, column-based database, and other related financial products. The language, originally developed in 1993, is a variant of APL and contains elements of Scheme. Advocates of the language emphasize its speed, facility in handling arrays and its expressive syntax.
Before developing K, A...
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K is a proprietary array processing language developed by Arthur Whitney and commercialized by Kx Systems. The language serves as the foundation for kdb, an in-memory, column-based database, and other related financial products. The language, originally developed in 1993, is a variant of APL and contains elements of Scheme. Advocates of the language emphasize its speed, facility in handling arrays and its expressive syntax.
Before developing K, Arthur Whitney had worked extensively with APL, first at I. P. Sharp Associates alongside Ken Iverson and Roger Hui, and later at Morgan Stanley developing financial applications. At Morgan Stanley, Whitney helped to develop A+, a variant of APL, to facilitate the migration of APL applications from IBM mainframes to a network of Sun workstations. A+ had a smaller set of primitive functions and was designed for speed and to handle large sets of time series data.
In 1993, Whitney left Morgan Stanley and developed the first version of the K...
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