Comment by hogFeast

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.