It costs an arm and a leg. I think Kx systems fucked up in making the language proprietary and closed source and charging for licenses. The smarter long-term play would have been to charge for support/special features/etc ala julia computing or lightbeam.
They have a huge database product (kdb). The company that owns Kx is a billion dollar company.
It really isn't clear to me why they do what they do (not just with regards to the language). They have a large consulting business (q/kdb consultants can make £1k/day easily) so it doesn't make a difference. I believe some parts of q/kdb are open-source but some parts are not. And I think this really does hurt them because there isn't a big eco-system around their products (for example, they have had to hire people internally to build ML libraries for q).
It is very weird: they are at the eye of the storm for data analytics, their product is fast, they are growing modestly doing lots of business with banks and in other industries that need streaming analytics particularly...but they are still niche, and growing a lot slower than you would expect (part of this is that management insists on being profitable...people rip on SV companies for not making money...well, Kx are the other side of this...they are modestly profitable, but not really growing).
EDIT: I should add, if you see the stuff that is open...a lot of the code is a total shitshow.
Given the combined cost of K licenses in banks and other large companies, I'd say they are really far from having messed up. The main goal of the company is not to promote K the language.
It costs an arm and a leg. I think Kx systems fucked up in making the language proprietary and closed source and charging for licenses. The smarter long-term play would have been to charge for support/special features/etc ala julia computing or lightbeam.
They have a huge database product (kdb). The company that owns Kx is a billion dollar company.
It really isn't clear to me why they do what they do (not just with regards to the language). They have a large consulting business (q/kdb consultants can make £1k/day easily) so it doesn't make a difference. I believe some parts of q/kdb are open-source but some parts are not. And I think this really does hurt them because there isn't a big eco-system around their products (for example, they have had to hire people internally to build ML libraries for q).
It is very weird: they are at the eye of the storm for data analytics, their product is fast, they are growing modestly doing lots of business with banks and in other industries that need streaming analytics particularly...but they are still niche, and growing a lot slower than you would expect (part of this is that management insists on being profitable...people rip on SV companies for not making money...well, Kx are the other side of this...they are modestly profitable, but not really growing).
EDIT: I should add, if you see the stuff that is open...a lot of the code is a total shitshow.
Given the combined cost of K licenses in banks and other large companies, I'd say they are really far from having messed up. The main goal of the company is not to promote K the language.
I don’t the Arthur Whitney feels like he missed out.
Looking quickly at the revs for Julia and Lightbeam, KX are doing rather better.