They are not experienced in the environment then? It is not that hard. Sure it is spartan as the tooling is not what you expect in 2021, but this seems a bit over the top?
> I have yet to see someone who can read his own stuff 2 weeks
http://nsl.com/ can, years later even (as can I but he has an impressive portfolio which makes it obvious).
And if your fluent in K, one-of scripts and queries are significantly shorter and easier to get right.
But it is not good as a general purpose language in a commercial setting - not because of the language itself which is fine if a bit spartan - but because it is hard to find people who are willing and able to work with it.
Much like its predecessor APL, it’s a tool for thought more than a tool for implementation.
And yes, it is nigh-unreadable. I have yet to learn it, but I think there is value in succinctness at least for throwaway scripts.
For a nice intro, read Nils' excellent book: https://www.t3x.org/klong/book.html it even has an idioms table in the back.
For instance to parse a binary encoded dictionary from a table column: -9!'columnName(I remember it because it s the first time I spent a day on something so useless yet so indispensible yet so fucked up). I challenge you to google it.
He likes succint hihihi.
I have to use it at work, helping quants try to actually maintain production code rather than just vomit horrible one-time scripts they patch together in an endless stream of layers on top of layers.
This thing should be banned. Everything is one-letter, it's impossible to Google, it takes the opposite decision of every imaginable convention, I have yet to see someone who can read his own stuff 2 weeks later. Notwithstanding free tools to query force-expire every 3 months (QPad grrr) and as you said it's so closed they have to take webdevs like me to just help them maintain it all eventually.
It's risky for the bank (and we're not a small one :s), it's expensive for the programmer, and it's misery for the quants (but they all feel like geniuses spending weeks on simple stuff on kdb, so their misery is only in people looking at them wasting away their brain like that).