It was optimized for interactive use by people that already know it.
want an ip address as an integer?
.z.a
-1062731737i
0N!h".z.e";
`CIPHER`PROTOCOL!`AES128-GCM-SHA256`TLSV1.2
Modern tech is so obsessed with high-turnover, sale-by-first-impression user growth toy software mindset, that it completely forgot about the idea of creating and optimizing tools for people who use those tools day in, day out.
Something that's easy to understand on a first impression is easy to understand on every subsequent impression as well. At least in terms of languages and libs no one is optimizing for that first impression, it's just a byproduct of making it easy to use in all cases.
I can actually query and understand tables in a very fast REPL in a way that would require 20-30 lines of SQL, nested subqueries, etc.
Even things like the way "left joins" work in KDB feels more natural than left joins in other SQL databases. https://code.kx.com/q/ref/lj/
B[A, on="x"] # A left join B
B[A] # same, assuming x is the key column on both, like K's lj [x;y]
A[B, on=.(x, y<=foo)] # right non-equi join // kdb+/q
t: ([] sym:`AAPL`IBM`GOOG; price: 139.09 124.23 948.82; vol: 123456 98765 54321)
# R
df <- data.frame(sym=c("AAPL", "IBM", "GOOG"), price=c(139.09, 124.23, 948.82), vol=c(123456, 98765, 54321))