Comment by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF

> So if I understand this right K is one of the more popular/recommended APL-derivatives nowadays.

Only APL and K see real industry use. Both are actively developed. K is really a family of mutually incompatible languages, called K3, K4, K5, etc. Financial applications and most of the development is on K4, as far as I understand.

> Which APL derivatives (with an active/healthy userbase) besides k would you recommend to take a closer look at?

But why not APL? Dyalog has a team actively working on their interpreter, and industry has mostly converged around Dyalog APL now. If you want something well-worn through real-world use, then it's basically the only choice, unless you have money to drop on K4 or Shakti. Also, the literature is dominated by APL.

If you're more interested in array languages for their mathematical appeal and for tinkering on puzzle problems, then BQN will probably suit your tastes. If you don't like the symbols and want something open-source, then J is a strong option. If you wonder what kind of baby APL and Forth would have, then Uiua is just for you.

Note that while J and BQN can be considered APL variants, K is somewhat of a separate beast.

Have fun!

https://www.jsoftware.com/ - J has a pretty active community, or at least used to.

re APL:

BQN is a new take on APL w/ high performance implementation

https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

Dyalog APL is a well supported proprietary APL implementation

https://www.dyalog.com

re open source k implementations:

there are many by now

here is a current non-exhaustive list grouped by k dialect they orbit (to my understanding)

k9

ktye (Go w/ Go, wasm, C targets) https://github.com/ktye/i

k6

ngn/growler (C): https://codeberg.org/growler/k

oK (JavaScript): https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok

kiwi (Zig): https://github.com/kiwi-array-lang/kiwi

k3

kona (C): https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona

gk (C): https://github.com/cmh25/gk

ksharp (C#): https://github.com/ERufian/ksharp

k-like

goal (Go): https://codeberg.org/anaseto/goal

klongpy (Python) https://github.com/briangu/klongpy

I'm working on kiwi.

kiwi has a focus on supporting Apple Silicon and can make use of Apple Silicon GPU (via MLX and Metal) as well as the Accelerate framework to speed up some workloads.

kiwi also comes with companion apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple watch in case anyone wants to run k on a watch:

https://kiwilang.com

I’m an array language novice but my favorite one so far is BQN. Much better documented than K derivatives. Not sure you could characterize any array language as having a “healthy userbase” though.

https://www.uiua.org/