My interrogation with Q

iFlow backend is going to be changed to Q, and the guys in New York have already started their part of work. Couple of weeks back, even I attended Q training just to find out that it is a manifestation of brain of a guy called Arthur Whitney. It is a highly complex language which is supposed to do all kinds of calculations superfast.

Jeff Borror did give us a lot of examples, told us lot of funny stories/incidents (some of them I believe are fictitious). My favorite one is the sudoku one of course .

So, there is this conference wherein people are coming up with shortest solution for a sudoku puzzle. Of course, the Perl guys were the first ones in line as they are famous in writing abstruse code and having sadistic pleasure looking at mortals trying to make sense out of it (after seeing the Q code, I have nothing against Perl guys doing this). Perl guys got their solution in 121 characters and were on the top of the world when Q guys came into the picture. The Q gods got their code down to just 99 characters and were ecstatic.

After all this, there came Arthur boy who managed to squeeze in the solution with just 57 characters, and a variety solutions saying something like "ok, this one takes 17 characters more, but is twice as fast"

I feel this is something very impressive. As I will be doing more hands on, I will be get to know whether my brain is meant to do this or not. They say this langauge is not really for object oriented brains which is exactly what I am.

There will be more on KDB+ and Q as I get my hands dirty with it...