The present site of KX has some mentions about a "q", so perhaps they have changed the spelling at some point, but at least many years ago I remember seeing only "K" and "Q".
Perhaps "k" and "q" refer to the interpreters of the languages, not to the languages themselves.
EDIT: TFA has links to a reference manual and a user manual from 1998, which use "K programming language" for the language and "K environment" for the program that includes the user interface and the K interpreter, so I have no idea who has ever used "k" for anything related to this.
Likely AI-generated. LLMs love putting emojis on lists.
Edit. From Authorship section:
This ksharp interpreter implementation was coded originally by SWE-1.5 and 1.6 with significant contributions from Kimi K-2.5 and 2.6 and Claude Opus/Sonnet 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 based on specifications, direction, prompts, comments and manual fixes provided by Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann.
Also, it's `k` as per Arthur Whitney's website (1).
1. https://k.nyc/
https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1515964.1531242
The same in this article from 2004:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070101213150/http://vector.org...
The present site of KX has some mentions about a "q", so perhaps they have changed the spelling at some point, but at least many years ago I remember seeing only "K" and "Q".
Perhaps "k" and "q" refer to the interpreters of the languages, not to the languages themselves.
EDIT: TFA has links to a reference manual and a user manual from 1998, which use "K programming language" for the language and "K environment" for the program that includes the user interface and the K interpreter, so I have no idea who has ever used "k" for anything related to this.
I have a letter from Mr. Whitney, and I'd say he doesn't use the shift key when typing — therefore I assume it's k.
Edit. From Authorship section:
This ksharp interpreter implementation was coded originally by SWE-1.5 and 1.6 with significant contributions from Kimi K-2.5 and 2.6 and Claude Opus/Sonnet 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 based on specifications, direction, prompts, comments and manual fixes provided by Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann.
couldn't this have been easier by expanding F#? or were they trying to hit a wider audience with C#?