q is a neat language, and I spent some time studying it when I was in finance, because it's useful to know q/kdb if you're a quant. Here's an offensive but acc

q is a neat language, and I spent some time studying it when I was in finance, because it's useful to know q/kdb if you're a quant. Here's an offensive but accurate taxonomy. There are 6-month languages/technologies and 20-year languages. The 6-month set are optimized toward being quick to learn fast. Java, for example, inherited C++ syntax while cleaning up the OOP, so the C++ programmers of the time could pick it up in quickly. Now, q and kdb are 20-year languages. It doesn't take 20 years to be productive with them, of course; it's that they're designed to optimize a person's productivity over 20 years, and not in the first 6 months. Unlike the various distributed tools out there (Hadoop, Hive) it will take you a long time to learn them, because they aren't like anything else. Superficially, q is Lisp-like, but the performance implications are very different and it doesn't look like a Lisp at all. (It parses right-to-left, for one example; also, it's written as a stream rather than in nested s-expressions.) Many of these modern tools being bashed have grown up in a world where 20-year tools can't really be built; they'll never catch on commercially in a world where people change jobs every 2 or 3 years, when MVPs are more important than solid decades-proof engineering, and where employers are pretty averse to their people taking time to just learn new technologies. There's too much volatility in the world for it to make sense for most people to learn q and kdb right away. You can get half-decent in a couple months, but it'll take much longer to learn why those tools are (for some use cases) so damn powerful. This 6-month vs. 20-year tool concern is part of why I've gravitated toward Clojure recently. I haven't seen anyone else do quite as good a job of balancing those two need sets as Rich Hickey and the Clojure community have. Clojure is (becoming) a 20-year language, but it's no harder to become basically productive in than Python or Ruby.