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"The problem is that Goldman's traders use a special computer language called "Slang" that was developed for internal use only." ^^^ What in God's name are tra
by jabbslad 16y ago
"The problem is that Goldman's traders use a special computer language called "Slang" that was developed for internal use only."
^^^ What in God's name are traders doing going anywhere near a programming language? Surely this is some mistake.
- waterside81 16y agoBelieve it or not, this is quite common in the industry. I developed some software for one of the Big 5 banks in Canada and I saw first hand traders learning to program using C++, Java, whatever they can get their hands on because they need to test out models, perform calculations that Excel can't do readily - although VBA is a trader's best friend. Recently, they've been using R more and more. And as you'd imagine, their code is horrendous but hey, it works. What I learned is that the entire financial industry relies on Excel and really bad programming. It's really scary to think that 37Signals has better software and software practices than a bank.
- stuntprogrammer 16y agoHistorically there has been some truly awful code, no doubt, and much still being written. There is a growing breed of trader though who can code well. Coding well in a variety of languages is becoming a basic skill along with advanced math & stats for certain types of trading jobs.
- smcl 16y agoI'm with you, I just started for a finance-y company and was rather shocked to see various non-developer\IT people tabbing over to MS SQL Management Studio every few minutes, running queries and updating tables!