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Sounds like a descendant of Goldman Sachs‘s SecDB/Slang with automatic dependency graph building. Did it have purple children (nodes whose value influences the

by FabHK 6y ago

Sounds like a descendant of Goldman Sachs‘s SecDB/Slang with automatic dependency graph building. Did it have purple children (nodes whose value influences the graph structure) and twiddle scopes (modified copies of subtrees)? :-)

stevesimmons 6y ago
Yes indeed. Quite a few of Athena's early developers were from GS. I've not heard the term "twiddle scopes" before; in Athena it is "tweaking".
- FabHK 6y ago
  Come to think of it, it might have been a “diddle scope” (I’m not a native speaker). For finance applications (risk) the whole concept works quite well, doesn’t it - combining the natural advantages of code and Excel.
  - adamdonahue 6y ago
    It was indeed "diddle," not "twiddle." At BAML, it's a "tweak." Beacon Platform is another implementation by the same team (but with support for the public cloud, and many more advanced features, I believe, including tighter web integration). I think it uses the terminology "bind." [Disclosure: I was part of the Quartz Core team in 2011/2012.]
eru 6y ago
I was positively surprised that Slang was actually quite usable. I had expected much worse. I suspect the Common Lisp influence was beneficial. The weirdest thing, language-wise, that I noticed was scoping. It's neither dynamic nor static scoping, but weird scoping. (But there are work-around to get something like static scoping.) Outside of the language, the whole CVS-based version control and review process was weird. But understandable as a product of the late 1990s, when review-before-going-into-permanent-history must have been way ahead of its time.
- sweeneyrod 6y ago
  > The weirdest thing, language-wise, that I noticed was scoping. Not the spaces in variable names?
  - silverdemon 6y ago
    Those annoyed me immensely. I can feel my heart rate go up 10 BPM just thinking about it. I guess it was meant to make scripts more readable to minimally-techy people, but actually just made it harder to parse.
  - eru 6y ago
    No, actually not. I found that quite refreshing and occasionally useful. But I was used to different and exotic conventions from the obscure languages I played with over the years.
- silverdemon 6y ago
  Slang was OK as a language. The SecDB/Slang ecosystem was years ahead of its time and all credit to its inventors and maintainers, but a monorepo full of decades of critical code from thousands of developers still gives me palpitations.
smallnamespace 6y ago
Just to add a bit of history, SecDB itself was an acquisition from J Aron, a commodity trading shop in the early 90s. It was ubiquitous in GS by the mid-2000s, and was rather instrumental to GS navigating the crisis in 2008. Being able to accurately and quickly compute risks across the entire firm's books, rather than manually merging across separate systems was key advantage, which encouraged JP, Citi and BofA to build a SecDB clone themselves. https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/1993-secdb.html https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/1993-s...

by FabHK 6y ago

stevesimmons 6y ago

Yes indeed. Quite a few of Athena's early developers were from GS. I've not heard the term "twiddle scopes" before; in Athena it is "tweaking".

FabHK 6y ago
Come to think of it, it might have been a “diddle scope” (I’m not a native speaker). For finance applications (risk) the whole concept works quite well, doesn’t it - combining the natural advantages of code and Excel.
- adamdonahue 6y ago
  It was indeed "diddle," not "twiddle." At BAML, it's a "tweak." Beacon Platform is another implementation by the same team (but with support for the public cloud, and many more advanced features, I believe, including tighter web integration). I think it uses the terminology "bind." [Disclosure: I was part of the Quartz Core team in 2011/2012.]

eru 6y ago

I was positively surprised that Slang was actually quite usable. I had expected much worse. I suspect the Common Lisp influence was beneficial. The weirdest thing, language-wise, that I noticed was scoping. It's neither dynamic nor static scoping, but weird scoping. (But there are work-around to get something like static scoping.) Outside of the language, the whole CVS-based version control and review process was weird. But understandable as a product of the late 1990s, when review-before-going-into-permanent-history must have been way ahead of its time.

sweeneyrod 6y ago
> The weirdest thing, language-wise, that I noticed was scoping. Not the spaces in variable names?
- silverdemon 6y ago
  Those annoyed me immensely. I can feel my heart rate go up 10 BPM just thinking about it. I guess it was meant to make scripts more readable to minimally-techy people, but actually just made it harder to parse.
- eru 6y ago
  No, actually not. I found that quite refreshing and occasionally useful. But I was used to different and exotic conventions from the obscure languages I played with over the years.
silverdemon 6y ago
Slang was OK as a language. The SecDB/Slang ecosystem was years ahead of its time and all credit to its inventors and maintainers, but a monorepo full of decades of critical code from thousands of developers still gives me palpitations.

smallnamespace 6y ago

Just to add a bit of history, SecDB itself was an acquisition from J Aron, a commodity trading shop in the early 90s. It was ubiquitous in GS by the mid-2000s, and was rather instrumental to GS navigating the crisis in 2008. Being able to accurately and quickly compute risks across the entire firm's books, rather than manually merging across separate systems was key advantage, which encouraged JP, Citi and BofA to build a SecDB clone themselves. https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/1993-secdb.html https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/1993-s...