Editing K (programming language) (section)

== History ==
Before developing K, Arthur Whitney had worked extensively with APL, first at [[I. P. Sharp Associates]] alongside [[Kenneth E. Iverson|Ken Iverson]] and [[Roger Hui]], and later at [[Morgan Stanley]] developing financial applications. At Morgan Stanley, Whitney helped to develop [[A+ (programming language)|A+]], a variant of APL, to facilitate migrating APL applications from [[IBM]] [[mainframe computer]]s to a network of Sun [[workstation]]s. A+ had a smaller set of primitive functions and was designed for speed and to handle large sets of time series data.<ref>{{cite web|title=arthur bio and interview|url=http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242}}</ref>

In 1993, Whitney left Morgan Stanley and developed the first version of the K language. At the same time he formed Kx Systems to commercialize the product and signed an exclusive contract with [[Union Bank of Switzerland]] (UBS). For the next four years he developed various financial and trading applications using K for UBS.

The contract ended in 1997 when UBS merged with [[Swiss Bank Corporation|Swiss Bank]]. In 1998, Kx Systems released kdb+, a database built on K. kdb was an [[in-memory database|in-memory]], [[column-oriented DBMS|column-oriented]] database and included ksql, a query language with an [[SQL]]-like syntax. Since then, several financial products have been developed with K and kdb+. kdb+/tick and kdb+/taq were developed in 2001. kdb+, a 64-bit version of kdb+ was released in 2003 and kdb+/tick and kdb+/taq were released in 2004. kdb+ included [[Q (programming language from Kx Systems)|Q]], a language that merged the functions of the underlying K language and ksql.<ref>{{citation|last=Garland|first=Simon|url=http://vector.org.uk/weblog/archive/000036.html|title=Q Language Widening the Appeal of Vectors|publisher=Vector UK|date=December 28, 2004|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070101213150/http://vector.org.uk/weblog/archive/000036.html|archive-date=January 1, 2007}}</ref>

Whitney released a derivative of K called Shakti in 2018.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://shakti.com/history/|title=Shakti}}</ref>