Whitney is so fascinating to me. His code is simultaneously awe-inspiring and horrifying. It's like he struck a Faustian bargain to gain programming powers beyond the ken of mere mortals, and is now cursed to write transcendently beautiful code that manifests as unintelligible gibberish to everyone else.

If you think this is horrifying you should see what people-who-aren't-Whitney write when they're copying his style, or adding to his codebase.

I think this is one of the reasons he does not release his code. K is such a small language, with a very limited number of primitives, that were chosen for the task they wanted to solve. Every user would want to change that one he never uses for that one he uses the whole time, so we would have lots of k implementations, each of them with its own mesh of spaghetti code and slightly different behaviors.

Talking for myself, I would love a FOSS version of k, but I am sure as hell I would patch a couple of things, and I am sure I would write much worse code than Whitney's (in his style or in my style).

I think the closest thing is https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona