5 ms·

A lot of this has to do with Excel. Average finance guy lives in Excel and no, libre/open office is not a replacement as they will not run a huge number of macr

A lot of this has to do with Excel. Average finance guy lives in Excel and no, libre/open office is not a replacement as they will not run a huge number of macros and DLLs connecting spreadsheets to external systems. Quant guys are often locked in matlab world and again - octave on Linux cannot be used due to incompatibilities.

paperwork 15y ago
I forgot about Excel. I think people outside of wall street will be surprised at this. I, myself, used a visual basic app to do some trading (not visual basic.net, VB!) as recently as a couple of years ago :). Even in the linux world, PERL is used by many quants for their analytics...not just to parse files, but as an alternative to R, matlab, etc.
- pnathan 15y ago
  It's Perl, not PERL. /sigh. Also, Perl is A Real Language, unlike.. ah, >.>, Excel.
  - paperwork 15y ago
    Let me switch sides for a moment and defend some of what happens here. In certain instances, Excel is a very good tool. In fact, if Excel's performance could be improved, it would become the best tool for some scenarios. For example, you need to manage a stream of data. You have prices coming in and you need to publish another set of prices going out (perhaps you are trying to peg quotes in the market off another set of quotes...details don't matter). Use Excel's RTD to put incoming prices into some cells. Calculate the outgoing price by typing out a simple formula which references the original cells. All other commonly used languages are more batch oriented, rather than stream oriented. In other languages, the code will implement some sort of call-back method to handle incoming data. This program will need some sort of "main" method. Perhaps the program will need to be compiled. Certainly the user will have to know how to run it. A non-programmer will obviously pick the excel solution (and many programmers will as well). The financial industry does lots of things ass backwards -- a few of them really do make sense :)
    - eru 15y ago
      You sound like you might be interested in a paper about "Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/excel/index.htm http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...).
      - dmboyd 15y ago
        I came accross this recently, along with some of the other papers guys from microsoft have put out about implementing functional languages within excel. I have to remind myself that these came out prior to the 2007 & 2010 versions of excel, and they ignored the most important recommendations and went with UI based "improvements" instead. These guys at Microsoft Cambridge Research are wasted as a talent, Its as if MSFT have "bought" them as a way of keeping ideas that are disruptive to their current streams of income under control.
        shriphani 15y ago
        how is consistently publishing papers and pushing the boundaries of PL further "keeping ideas disruptive to their current streams of income under control"? I mean the ideas are not hoarded, they are published, F# is open sourced and SPJ hacks on haskell. Where did you draw your conclusion from? Oh wait, I forgot this is HN.
        sciurus 15y ago
        While they work for Microsoft Research, they won''t be implementing their ideas in commercial products.
        paperwork 15y ago
        I think C# disproves this fairly well. C# has lambda functions, monads, type inference (either now or next version). People like Eric Meijer have moved from pure research to product groups.
sparky 15y ago
Though there is no drop-in Matlab replacement, at least there are native versions of Matlab for OS X and Linux. The only incompatibility that would arise there is if some underlying third-party .mex files used Windows-only APIs.

paperwork 15y ago

I forgot about Excel. I think people outside of wall street will be surprised at this. I, myself, used a visual basic app to do some trading (not visual basic.net, VB!) as recently as a couple of years ago :). Even in the linux world, PERL is used by many quants for their analytics...not just to parse files, but as an alternative to R, matlab, etc.

pnathan 15y ago
It's Perl, not PERL. /sigh. Also, Perl is A Real Language, unlike.. ah, >.>, Excel.
- paperwork 15y ago
  Let me switch sides for a moment and defend some of what happens here. In certain instances, Excel is a very good tool. In fact, if Excel's performance could be improved, it would become the best tool for some scenarios. For example, you need to manage a stream of data. You have prices coming in and you need to publish another set of prices going out (perhaps you are trying to peg quotes in the market off another set of quotes...details don't matter). Use Excel's RTD to put incoming prices into some cells. Calculate the outgoing price by typing out a simple formula which references the original cells. All other commonly used languages are more batch oriented, rather than stream oriented. In other languages, the code will implement some sort of call-back method to handle incoming data. This program will need some sort of "main" method. Perhaps the program will need to be compiled. Certainly the user will have to know how to run it. A non-programmer will obviously pick the excel solution (and many programmers will as well). The financial industry does lots of things ass backwards -- a few of them really do make sense :)
  - eru 15y ago
    You sound like you might be interested in a paper about "Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/excel/index.htm http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...).
    - dmboyd 15y ago
      I came accross this recently, along with some of the other papers guys from microsoft have put out about implementing functional languages within excel. I have to remind myself that these came out prior to the 2007 & 2010 versions of excel, and they ignored the most important recommendations and went with UI based "improvements" instead. These guys at Microsoft Cambridge Research are wasted as a talent, Its as if MSFT have "bought" them as a way of keeping ideas that are disruptive to their current streams of income under control.
      - shriphani 15y ago
        how is consistently publishing papers and pushing the boundaries of PL further "keeping ideas disruptive to their current streams of income under control"? I mean the ideas are not hoarded, they are published, F# is open sourced and SPJ hacks on haskell. Where did you draw your conclusion from? Oh wait, I forgot this is HN.
        sciurus 15y ago
        While they work for Microsoft Research, they won''t be implementing their ideas in commercial products.
        paperwork 15y ago
        I think C# disproves this fairly well. C# has lambda functions, monads, type inference (either now or next version). People like Eric Meijer have moved from pure research to product groups.

sparky 15y ago

Though there is no drop-in Matlab replacement, at least there are native versions of Matlab for OS X and Linux. The only incompatibility that would arise there is if some underlying third-party .mex files used Windows-only APIs.