petermora

How could they travel that far? Isn't that faster than speed of light?

Hi Geo,

Thank you for the time to respond. I understand that speed is very important and I'm happy that Q takes it seriously. I was never questioning that part. I also understand the beauty of functional programming paradigms (working with maps and applys), I wrote many lines in Mathematica without "for" loops. I also understood many code snippets written by developers working only with Q (I guess they are experts). I don't know the full power of Q, but I can imagine what is achievable.

I haven't worked with Q for 18 months, the debugger sounds cool. Forgive me if my knowledge is not up-to-date. Also I wanted to use the language immediately without learning it for months, which might be the main source of my frustration.

I believe that there could be a better developer environment without making the system slower, and that could reduce the time required to use the language efficiently from the several months to several days or hours.

The evaluation order is not clear to me. I understand this expression:

  q){x+2*y} scan 2 3 5 7 

(the result is: 2 8 18 32). However, I often had to read more complicated code which contained 1 or 2 character long operators. Without fully understand their syntax, I was unable to tell whether those operators take values from both sides, which stopped me from understanding the evaluation order. It would be great if a tool could convert this expression to

  q)scan[{x+2*y};2 3 5 7]

and that tool also would replace cryptic 2 character long operators by long readable names (e.g., MapForTables).

I think that the error messages need to be as verbose as possible. You mentioned that experts don't ask for the debugger and verbose error messages. I think that they simply got used to not having these useful features, but they would use them eventually. I'm okey with the limited number of variables until it gives a proper error message if violated.

People working with Q told me that it was hard for them to restart working with Q after 1 month break, because they forgot the lexical knowledge needed for the efficient work.

Peter

I worked in Pascal, C/C++, Java, Python, R, Nim, Clojure, Rust, Go, Js, and created various projects in these languages.

However, I couldn't get used to Q. I understand that it is fast, and I also started to like the functional programming aspect of it. But oh boy, there is no proper error messages (no, "`type" is not helpful). The short versions of various map and apply were handy, but there are no equivalent versions with longer names, therefore there is no way to write a code which is readable to a non Q-expert. The strange evaluation order made it impossible for me to read other people's code, I often started to add parentheses and checked whether the behavior changed. There is no debugger (I used KdbStudio). Once I used more than 16 local variables, which gave a runtime error with some strange unhelpful error message.

I'm not questioning its usefulness, but I think that it could be much more developer friendly without compromising speed.