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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

From my own personal experience, F# got Microsoft into a lot of hedge funds, prop shops, and other places with math/physics staff that like functional languages that would otherwise have been Unix-focused.

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Lots of hedge funds used MS stacks even before F# - I'm guessing the biggest reason is staff skill set both of the early developers and the other tech people. Most hedge funds will only have a single IT guy to maintain app servers (exchange, etc.) so it makes sense for the trading servers to be Windows as well to avoid having to hire a Unix sysadmin.

That doesn't sound right. I don't think F# is a commercial success.

Can you give me one example of a hedge fund that uses F#?

F# is used in quite a number of firms, especially in the Chicago area I am aware of a handful of companies. Initially it was used just for prototyping/modeling type stuff, but more and more it is seeing the light of day in production. It will never see the adoption scale of Java/C# but that isn't the point or the goal.

It makes sense as well if you follow the history of most of these trading firms. Most of them started out just manipulating excel spreadsheets. Then brought in vb macros and such and then from there some diverge into java or go straight to some functional programming solution like ocaml with jane street, but others stay tied to msft with C#. Then F# comes along and allows intelligent developers at these msft firms to express themselves more clearly when dealing with the type of math problems they are solving.

If the firm is using C# I am almost certain that F# is in the mix there as well.

The F# user groups in London are filled with people working in finance who use F#. One or two people using it for science or startups (data analysis) as well. Looks to be a fair amount of interest in using it as a language for side projects for the people I spoke to there, while MS are not pushing it as much as C#, they do support its use in the banks.

In my experience, some funds may keep their technology choices close to their vest.

A lot of Smalltalk programmers / NeXTSTEP programmer can vouch for that.

Jane street already use Ocaml, so they are probably lost to Microsoft. But that at least prove the presence of a market. Microsoft may want a share.

Credit Suisse has about 100 people in their algorithmic trading and risk management group using F#.

Thanks - I just finished at CS and was about to cite it as my example.

As NeXT proved, you can have good sales to high-end finance firms without being commercially successful.

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