4 ms·
The word on the street in the Haskell community is that what you say is definitely true in many places, but Haskell makes inroads by being pretty fast if not C
by tel 13y ago
The word on the street in the Haskell community is that what you say is definitely true in many places, but Haskell makes inroads by being pretty fast if not C fast, grabbing Excel interaction [1], and building banking-related DSLs [2]. The typical story is that the Haskell shop builds advanced tools atop Excel, analysts get excited and want more, then the Haskell shop teaches them just enough Haskell to run a pricing DSL. Static types make it so that relatively untrained programmers can still manipulate the DSL adroitly.
All that to say not that Haskell is going to beat Java/C++ in any visible time frame but instead to compare its use favorably with something like Python.
[1] See Paradise, Credit Suisse's Excel interop library (http://www.icfpconference.org/icfp2008/accepted/37.html http://www.icfpconference.org/icfp2008/accepted/37.html)
[2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.htm http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoI thought most of the Haskell uptake in finance was localized to the UK? This might have more to do with the interests of the high end talent there than a more global phenomena.
- tel 13y agoCould be. I'm not in finance personally, just rattling the grapvine. That said, the theory isn't bad: Lennart Augustsson, Don Stewart, and Neil Mitchell are all in the UK I believe. I think the story still holds though: financial analysts are provided an upgrade path from Excel to Excel+Haskell backend, to Haskell embedded DSLs. The same sort of game might be happening with S&P in Boston.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoBack in the 90s, Objective C (used for iPhones today) and other Smalltalks were big in Manhattan's financial scene. Scala is also being pushed in finance today by some boutique firms in Europe. And then there is of course Common Lisp... This isn't that strange or unusual at all, the languages just sort of appear and get some local mass going, but nothing catches on globally.