Comment by doug-moen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doug-moen | Hacker News Reader

FYI: This only implements a subset of K (I'd estimate 1/3).

Calling it a 'release' is an overstatement. The docs state that it is a work in progress. It's also quite buggy (it's easy to get a segmentation fault). The version I saw in January was about 1/3 the size of this version, and also buggy. I hope that the final version of this code is less buggy and more usable.

If you want to learn the K language, don't use this version. Any of the other open source K projects are better than this (more complete, less buggy, better documented). This project is good if you want to learn more about the Arthur Whitney C coding style, because it is so small. Other projects written in this style (some open source K implementations, the J language) are huge by comparison.

> Any of the other open source K projects are better than this (more complete, less buggy, better documented).

One thing that puzzles me, about array languages, is that despite several open source implementations already existing, like J, its surprisingly difficult to find them packaged in Linux repositories. For example, you can't just "apt install J", or "apt install gnu-apl" on Ubuntu. In J case, it seems the default is just compiling it from source. Is there something tricky about packaging them?

The closest to a repository-friendly array language I could find was the klongpy implementation of klong[0], that is pip installable.

[0]. https://t3x.org/klong/

You can 'apt install apl' for GNU APL. Most open-source array languages though either have very few users, and/or are moving quite fast and thus an apt-packaged version would likely be rather out-of-date quite basically always. Though, for example, nix has J, BQN, uiua, GNU APL, and Dyalog APL (based on quick searches), so the barrier to entry to apt also is presumably rather high.

I could swear that I used to install j902 from apt on Ubuntu. Am I misremembering this?

Arch has j901 in AUR which is directly installable if you have a helper (like `rua`) (or you can download the `tar.gz` and run `makepkg`.)

it's work-in-progress for fun/educational purposes (i.e. read and learn something)

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