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Another comment mentioned excel, and I have no hard time believing it because the reactive interface is intuitive and the algorithms involved are likely not too technical, for lack of a better word.

No experience in that area, but are we talking something like COBOL? Wouldn't be surprised if software architectures used to manage order books in exchanges from the early days got re-purposed.

I remember when Betfair seemed to be a bunch of shonky crap stitched together. I can easily imagine a load of Perl scripts before they invested in Oracle in a big way.

before they invested in Oracle in a big way

Yep, got it: it was all done in PL/SQL. Clicks on the website went through a simple Java layer and called stored procs. At the time we were doing more transactions/sec than all the European stock exchanges combined, and often the Japanese too. It makes me chuckle when people say to me now "but SQL databases don't scale" when they are running 1/10th of the workload we were running 10 yeara ago...

No idea what they're using now, mind, I left after the IPO but before the merger.

Did you use TCL?

Not for the exchange no.