8 ms·
There's a long history of using alternative in-house languages at Wall St. firms (and new ones are being developed at a few large firms I know).
by stuntprogrammer 16y ago
There's a long history of using alternative in-house languages at Wall St. firms (and new ones are being developed at a few large firms I know).
- gaius 16y agoMorgan Stanley and others were big users of APL, back in the day. Now that's a wacky language!
- stuntprogrammer 16y agoAPL isn't all that weird once you spend a little time with it. It's "just" a dynamically typed collection-oriented language. I think people look at some screenshots, make a stupid joke since they aren't familiar with the notation, and move on rather than digging in. I highly recommend Dyalog's dialect for a comfortable IDE, OO support, .NET support for GUIs on Windows etc. For MS' APL dialect, you can get the whole thing from: http://www.aplusdev.org/ http://www.aplusdev.org/ My understanding is that they still have many many lines of code written in this language running. They also use a commercial intellectual successor of this language called q from kx systems. Many other firms do as well, but I won't name them since I don't know which ones are public about it. I'm pretty sure that the firms I know creating new languages are not public about it, but there are at least 3 very very large ones doing so. Aiming for a functional flavor, large-scale parallelism, streaming, low-latency processing of large data sets, high-quality compilation and leveraging new hardware are common themes.
- gaius 16y agoYep, I used to work with a bloke from IP Sharp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._P._Sharp_Associates#APL_Implementors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._P._Sharp_Associates#APL_Impl...), he showed me some cool stuff. I have another friend who does q and kdb+ stuff.
- scotth 16y agoI currently work with a bunch of Sharpies, including Dave Markwick (mentioned in that article). Dave still writes APL from time to time.
- joshu 16y agoFor what its worth, a+ was mostly used in the fixed income decision. Over in equities, I never touched it - most of my work was in perl and SAS.
- stuntprogrammer 16y agoTrue - joel kaplan's group in FID was the source iirc.
- joshu 16y agodidn't stop every fucking aurora machine from bitching about missing kaplgallant though. heh.
- stuntprogrammer 16y agoWell just in case you wanna cry into your beer over that font - you can get it here for old times sake. http://www.aplusdev.org/Download/x11fonts.tar.gz http://www.aplusdev.org/Download/x11fonts.tar.gz
- joshu 16y agonooooooooooooooooooooo