Some snark in here, I'll try and give it a fair shake. Whitney's site mentions '300 spartans' as the rough number of people using k, although it's probably more than that.
Two reasons k folks like k: first, if you believe that programmer working memory, as in the number of chars or lines of code you personally can hold in your head is limited, then it might make sense to be as terse as possible -- this will significantly increase the range of things you can reason about.
Second, if such a language were to focus more on array and vector-level manipulation, then for certain sorts of math tasks, you might be pretty close to grad student nirvana -- programming looks like using a chalkboard to work out a strategy for some processing, and then straightforwardly translating this strategy without mucking around with all the 100s of lines of weird shit say python or java make you do to process something in bulk and in parallel.
On top of this, whitney is a mad genius, and his k interpreters tend to be SCREAMING fast, and, like a couple of hundred kilobytes compiled. Over time the language has built connections to large-scale data processing jobs (as in, you run a microsend-or-shorter-timeframe strategy based on realtime depth data from 500 different stocks, say), and it has benefitted from the path dependence you get there.
Anyway back to the top - it exists as both a rallying cry for and a great tool for a certain sort of engineer that wants to make millions of dollars and refer to him/herself as a "Spartan" of coders.
Two reasons k folks like k: first, if you believe that programmer working memory, as in the number of chars or lines of code you personally can hold in your head is limited, then it might make sense to be as terse as possible -- this will significantly increase the range of things you can reason about.
Second, if such a language were to focus more on array and vector-level manipulation, then for certain sorts of math tasks, you might be pretty close to grad student nirvana -- programming looks like using a chalkboard to work out a strategy for some processing, and then straightforwardly translating this strategy without mucking around with all the 100s of lines of weird shit say python or java make you do to process something in bulk and in parallel.
On top of this, whitney is a mad genius, and his k interpreters tend to be SCREAMING fast, and, like a couple of hundred kilobytes compiled. Over time the language has built connections to large-scale data processing jobs (as in, you run a microsend-or-shorter-timeframe strategy based on realtime depth data from 500 different stocks, say), and it has benefitted from the path dependence you get there.
Anyway back to the top - it exists as both a rallying cry for and a great tool for a certain sort of engineer that wants to make millions of dollars and refer to him/herself as a "Spartan" of coders.