Walter's DConf 2014 Talks - Topics in Finance

[Daniel Davidson via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 23 December 2014 at 03:07:10 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> At one very big US hf I worked with, the tools were initially 
> written in Perl (some years back).  They weren't pretty, but 
> they worked, and were fast and robust enough.  I has many new 
> features I needed for my trading strategy.  But the owner - who 
> liked to read about ideas on the internet - came to the 
> conclusion that Perl was not institutional quality and that we 
> should therefore cease new development and rewrite everything 
> in C++.  Two years later a new guy took over the larger group, 
> and one way or the other everyone left.  I never got my new 
> tools, and that certainly didn't help on the investment front.  
> After he left a year after that they scrapped the entire code 
> base and bought Murex as nobody could understand what they had.
>
> If we had had D then, its possible the outcome might have been 
> different.
>

Interesting perspective on the FI group's use of perl. Yes that 
group was one of the reasons a whole new architecture committee 
was established to prevent IT tool selection (like Perl and 
especially Java) the firm did not want to be used or supported. 
Imagine after that being prohibited from using Python. Having to 
beg to get to use it embedded from C++ and when finally granted 
permission having to rewrite the much of boost python since boost 
was not a sanctioned tool. Big companies make decisions 
differently than others. I believe D would not have been a help 
in that organization and requesting its use would have been the 
surest way to get a termination package. That said, in other 
organizations D might have been a good choice.

> So in any case, hard to generalise, and better to pick a few 
> sympathetic people that see in D a possible solution to their 
> pain, and use patterns will emerge organically out of that.  I 
> am happy to help where I can, and that is somewhat my own 
> perspective - maybe D can help me solve my pain of tools not up 
> to scratch because good investment tool design requires 
> investment and technology skills to be combined in one person 
> whereas each of these two are rare found on their own.  (D 
> makes a vast project closer to brave than foolhardy),
>
> It would certainly be nice to have matrices, but I also don't 
> think it would be right to say D is dead in water here because 
> it is so far behind.  It also seems like the cost of writing 
> such a library is v small vs possible benefit.
>

I did not say D is dead in the water here. But when it comes to 
math platforms it helps to have lots of people behind the 
solution. For math julia seems to have that momentum now. Maybe 
you can foster that in D.