Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the Digital New York Times

I went on an interview one time in which the job was not for python, but in which the coding exercise was in python, the assumption being that they wanted to see how you handled something you didn't know.

The interviewer mentioned having another guy in who announced flat out he was not going to do it even though it was explained that you didn't need to know the language to solve the problem.

I of course had some python familiarity, but I still failed because I couldn't remember the name for binary search and that threw me for a loop when the obvious answer I should have gone for in the exercise was 'here we should use binary search'.

So if Google or Facebook write themselves a new language (or two), I'm guessing you are ok with that? I have worked at Standard Chartered and their compiler was written by a world renown former CS professor, who also wrote the worlds first Haskell compiler. The quant code written in this language is some of the best I have ever seen on the street; certainly better than the python shops (who are using forked hacked-up variants of Python anyway). Goldman Sachs also had a huge advantage for many years thanks to their proprietary technology. Sometimes an in-house language is actually a sign of innovation.

Dropbox is widely considered a highly desirable place to work; it's odd that you describe it as an example of extreme dysfunction. Likewise, I think GS is generally viewed as the technically strongest IB.

If you include DSLs in what you say, then I disagree vehemently, at least as to DSLs.

For larger programming languages, it depends. Mainly it's a very long-term commitment. It requires having a strong commitment to funding a team to develop, maintain, and support it. Is that a good idea? I don't know in general. In specific cases it may be an absolutely brilliant idea, though I suspect in most actual cases it's a terrible idea mainly due either to inadequacy of the business case for the proprietary language, or inadequate funding. In order to build and keep proprietary a programming language for decades the value proposition in it has to be enormous -- that makes the business case unlikely, but not impossible.

By all accounts, S-Lang and SecDB were massive successes and major instruments in Goldman’s competitive advantage in the industry.

On another note, what about Facebook and Reason ML, and Mozilla and Rust? Or C#, etc etc. There have been dozens of successful languages that originated from companies.

Numerous programming languages, including basic, algol, etc used for loops. Notably absent from the list of languages which used FOR as a looping construct was Fortran, which used 'do' for looping, and cobol, which used 'perform'. So whatever languages it was, it wasn't Fortran.

Twenty years ago I would have prototyped the solution in perl as an Apache module and then rewritten the slow hot spots in c.

But I don't know what their hardware constraints weredit person => perl

I think you are underestimating how novel those things were 20 years ago. The NYT has been ahead-of-the-curve when it comes to the sophistication of their webpage for about that long. Perhaps their language helped.