4 ms·

The regulation will be very state-dependent, though. EDIT: oh, and that annoying halting problem...

• stcredzero 17y ago
  Is a monkey-patching friendly language really the best thing for this? (Asks the Smalltalk guy, whose language is just as monkey-patching friendly and is used in a lot of Financial apps.) Functional languages would be much better for this purpose.
  • csytan 17y ago
    Monkey patching (from what I've seen) is almost always the result of a poor programming, something which no language can be shielded from.
    • stcredzero 17y ago
      No, but in the right language, you can at least be shielded from the monkey-patching.
      • DrSprout 17y ago
        But you need trained programmers to use the right language. Also, Python is clearly a step up from English on a variety of metrics, including the reduction of the ability to monkey-patch.
        • stcredzero 17y ago
          Functional languages can do even better, however.
    • lallysingh 17y ago
      Good languages actively fight off poor programming. Take ML or Haskell: if you didn't think about the problem well enough beforehand, it won't compile.
  • ay 17y ago
    On a second thought they can use Python fine. Just issue something like the text at www.brool.com/?p=97 as the very first requirement.
  • rit 17y ago
    Python has some FP features. More importantly, it's incredibly easy to learn, available on just about every platform (JVM users and .Net users can use it, Mac, Linux, Windows, etc).
    • mkramlich 17y ago
      agreed, plus by my understanding it is also already fairly popular in the financial programming community.
    • stcredzero 17y ago
      Python has some FP features. More importantly, it's incredibly easy to learn, available on just about every platform (JVM users and .Net users can use it, Mac, Linux, Windows, etc). Yes, but having "some FP features" is a far cry from being able to use FP to do lots of reasoning about your program.
      • rit 17y ago
        It's not intended to be a complex statistical model. It's intended to replace XML Files that may have included calculations, with a system that allows people to plug their assumptions into the program and get an answer, rather than parsing XML and turning that into a program. My understanding is that the type of calculations they're talking about, if you need complex Functional Programming you're doing it wrong.
  • skybrian 17y ago
    If they're smart then it would actually be a very restrictive subset of Python, not the full language.