Comment by wood_spirit
1 year ago
GP here :)
When talking about speed I was rolling the time taken to write the query and get the query to run with the run time. The total speed depends upon both.
In another thread someone pointed out that being a good quant is also about having the best ideas in the first place.
This is just a general comment on the whole comments section in general that I leave here:
We have this weird situation where the general programming population looks at a small group of the most profitable programmers who are thinking about their domain problems in languages that are a mapping or mathematical symbols to a qwerty keyboard (in the old days there were APL keyboards). And the mainstream programmers say that is so weird that it must be wrong and must be a lie and so on.
Occam’s razor says that those profitable programmers wouldn’t be buying K if the same results at lower TCO or better results at a higher price?
In broader data engineering there has been tech like “I use scala!” that are used to gatekeep and recognise the in crowd. But that is in the faceless corporate end of enterprise data engineering where people are not measured in bottom lines.
Sorry for venting :)
> most profitable programmers
This more than anything demonstrates the hothouse-flower mentality of K stans. Quants have long since stopped being the best-paid or most value-generating engineers, and since K has zero application outside of quant, it's no longer even a particularly lucrative skill to acquire.
It's interesting though that the opacity of the "I make more money than you" argument fits so snugly with other unverifiable and outdated claims of K supremacy, like performance, job security, or expressiveness.
Besides, it has been my experience that the more the programming part of a given quant's job contributes to their profitability, the less they enjoy using K. K is a neat language for research, but I don't know of many who still like it as a language to write code you intend to reuse or maintain.
That said, I would personally rather do research in python, especially now that the performance situation is reversed.