Kx released a 32bit, free-for-commercial-use version in 2014 and then reversed course around a year later after banks and hedge funds surprised them by flocking to it for a large subset of their developers / dev machines.
Hopefully they stick to it this time around. It's an incredible system. It's the only thing I've ever used, including Pandas, dplyr & Matlab, where someone could stand over my shoulder asking data analysis questions and I could answer them, on the fly.
LLM's, though notoriously bad (so far) at KDB+/Q compared to other languages, are still a godsend for folks getting started. I recently returned to writing Q after being away from it for 8 years and I've been amazed how good even Google's AI suggestions have been at helping with functions & queries.
Getting started tip: try using Q strictly as a query language, avoid K. Do everything else (data shoveling, devops,...) with a different language.
Particularly when these analytical advantages may compound over time rather than dissipate. For instance, suppose a firm was exceptionally good at pairing world-class mathematicians with a team of mathematically-exceptional programmers who could reconceptualize the math wizard's insights as financial time series models and steer them towards areas of applicability. Now, when the next world-class mathematician comes to the office on a recruiting trip, he recognizes a higher expected value & better colleagues, joins, and the engine gets more repetitions with which to improve itself.
I worked on an Excel\vba swat team at an investment bank. Whenever someone in the various business units got themselves into more trouble than they could handle with an Excel model, we'd try to set things right. We saw a lot of wonderfully creative vba code from industrious programming beginners (or, as we liked to call them, "Macro Recording Cowboys". The most amusing I saw was a model where the vba code used a Greek mythology variable naming convention:
Dim Hermes As String, Artemis As Long, Odin As Range
Hopefully they stick to it this time around. It's an incredible system. It's the only thing I've ever used, including Pandas, dplyr & Matlab, where someone could stand over my shoulder asking data analysis questions and I could answer them, on the fly.
LLM's, though notoriously bad (so far) at KDB+/Q compared to other languages, are still a godsend for folks getting started. I recently returned to writing Q after being away from it for 8 years and I've been amazed how good even Google's AI suggestions have been at helping with functions & queries.
Getting started tip: try using Q strictly as a query language, avoid K. Do everything else (data shoveling, devops,...) with a different language.