I completely agree with you. Compared to the bloatware of the Hadoop stack K looks and feels like lightning. But when evaluated on its own K is less magical. Im

I completely agree with you. Compared to the bloatware of the Hadoop stack K looks and feels like lightning. But when evaluated on its own K is less magical. Impenetrable code not-withstanding its design is fairly simple (good thing TM) and not that hard to beat. If one could delay code-gen even further, it would be possible to inline and compose even bigger chunks of operations into code giving more speed up. A well JIT'ed numpy or Judy should (famous last words) be up there with K. Since it has not been mentioned yet, let me point out that Barry Jay's Fish should be a part of this conversation. Sadly its quite hard to find. I don't know why those pages have disappeared.