Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013)

Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by trhway on Friday June 12, 2015 @07:19PM (#9709154)

>Comparing, say, Kx systems Q/KDB (80s technology which still sells for upwards of $100k a CPU, and is worth every penny) to Hive or Reddis is an exercise in high comedy. Q does what Hive does. It does what Reddis does. It does both, several other impressive things modern “big data” types haven’t thought of yet, and it does them better, using only a few pages of tight C code, and a few more pages of tight K code.

it is exactly exercise in comedy. Hive and Reddis are free. They do for regular persons and tasks what only $100K/CPU systems of yesterday were doing. It is like comparing high-professional $100K film cameras of yesterday with today's consumer 5-10M cameras. A $100K thing which i would never had access to vs. real cheap/free gigantic expansion of my capabilities. The choice is obvious to me.

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by taeric on Friday June 12, 2015 @07:52PM (#9709254)

There is a difference. The new cameras are based on more advanced tech. The new storage machines are not necessarily based on new ideas in algorithmic execution.

I'm not sure I agree, but the assertion of the article is that much of today's pain is a refusal to acknowledge the progress of the past.

For myself, there is a lot to this. Many of my peers and the younger crowd are convinced that the problems they are solving have never been considered in the past. To the point that some of my coworkers are proud that they are "weak" in algorithms.

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by nickpsecurity on Saturday June 13, 2015 @11:07AM (#9711218)

It's a strawman because nobody is trying to sell you anything, especially a commodity. Their market are people dropping loads of money on datamining hardware and personnel with an aim to get the most analytical value for their money. Then they find out about this excellent database that blows the competition away in capabilities and efficiency. Spending a little extra on this maximizes ROI on their hardware.

And so many companies do. Others continue working with crap like Hive and Reddis where they spend more time & money on supporting the software than getting analysis done.

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by kiyoto on Friday June 12, 2015 @10:44PM (#9709680)

KDB is nothing like Hive or redis. In fact, there is no prominent open source project comparable to KDB in terms of architecture or use case.

KDB is a fast column oriented database with an APL-like API. Hive is a SQL translation layer for MapReduce/Tez and Redis is a key-value store with rich data structures.

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by ah- on Friday June 12, 2015 @08:37PM (#9709379)

KDB is actually free nowadays if you can live with the 32bit limitation.

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by branchless on Friday June 12, 2015 @09:46PM (#9709536)

Banks have moved to linux from paid o/s yet they continue to shell out for KDB (and the dev are not cheap either).

Why did they move a whole o/s platform but not from kdb?

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by joebo on Friday June 12, 2015 @10:42PM (#9709674)

I assume to keep licensing current to support legacy code. I would be surprised if much revenue comes from new installs

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by gd1 on Saturday June 13, 2015 @12:35AM (#9709878)

KDB is the tool of choice on new projects. Also, $12.5k a core these days (last I checked).

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by octatoan on Saturday June 13, 2015 @01:53AM (#9710052)

Learning about those things is different from actually using those in production. J/K are indeed very, very interesting languages.

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by gwu78 on Saturday June 13, 2015 @02:02AM (#9710067)

Not sure about you, but the software we are forced to use at work is never as pleasing as the software we can use at home.

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Re:Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013) by scottlocklin on Saturday June 13, 2015 @09:19PM (#9713445)

I managed to use J at work. Kicked the crap out of a 240 core spark process on one thread. It really is an amazing technology, and people ignore it and lessons of the past at their peril.

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