The rise of functional programming in Banks | Hacker News Reader

The rise of functional programming in Banks

blog.oxfordknight.com

69 pointspiokuc37 comments

Guys,

Not sure how it got picked up, but i don't think it's a creppy stalking of my profile...in fact i am flattered. Thank you for your feedback.

Couple of things that I think is worth adding here:

1. This article was the first article i ever wrote for Oxford Knight 2 years ago. The date refresh on our website is wrong. My intention was to give something back to the community I serve, and also learn from feedback. Some of it does look like I am stating the obvious, but at the time it wasn’t obvious to everyone. Furthermore, recruitment isn’t designed to be open-source. It’s all about protecting IP at the lowest level, so to open up even a little bit is a big step for us/recruiters….i hope some of you guys can appreciate that .

2. The article was written looking at how I used to recruit in 2006. Shallow, buzz word chasing, educational profile chasing etc. I like to think I’ve evolved a bit since 2006, but do understand I still have a lot to learn an certainly won’t let my non-technical background get in the way.

3. If you guys are interested in seeing some of my more recent stuff I’ve written, it maybe worth jumping on to my quora profile where I write more actively about the technology trends in london….Quora (Abdul-Muhit).

4. Finally, I do feel the pain of how recruitment operates now. Changing a £4 billion industry is not easy, and no technical innovation is going to make a sector of that size disappear anytime soon. I founded Oxford Knight with the view of creating a legacy not a transaction service business. For a boy that was raised by a single mother on benefits I have all the little things I need now! For me it’s all about creating a legacy….something built to last. Therefore, if we have upset anyone of you guys with below par service then please do feel free to email directly, and I promise I will do my upmost to fix it.

Best, Abdul co-founder of Oxford Knight

"Finally, whilst I have never coded, because Clojure/Scala is on the JVM it’s very easy to pick up for a good Java developer."

I guess it's another recruiter wondering why he gets no respect from the cattle he handles...

Oxford Knight are one of the few "good" recruitment companies in London in my opinion. I've never dealt with Abdul directly, but I've met with some of his colleagues over the years and hold them in higher regard than the bigger agencies. At least he's making an effort to understand the landscape in which he operates, which is more effort than most recruiters in London put in!

Oxford Knight is a technical recruitment agency. None of our consultants have written a line of code... yet.

So it seems to be a company-wide feature. It's hard to see though how technically semi-literate technical recruiters can be a good thing at all. Perhaps this explains in part this other telling quote from the article:

I recall the candidate in question being perfect in every aspect (CompSci from top university, sound understanding of data structures, algorithms, complexity... coupled with actual practical programming experience, and oh yeah – decent knowledge of Exotic Risk and Pricing).

Note the order of qualifications, suggesting that having top marks from Oxford is just as relevant/important as knowing how to crank through data structures/algorithms questions; with having actual programming or domain/relevant experience as just a nice plus.

Very telling of their mindset, but also understandable if they are not qualified enough to assess the technical competence of candidates on technical terms alone.

I got the impression that this was someone just out of college. "Knowing how to crank through data structures/algorithms questions" probably means knowing how to talk about them in an interview, not lots of real-world experience. If that's the case, top marks from Oxford may in fact be the most relevant fact about the candidate.

I agree - it sounded very much like someone trying to be "out there writing" rather than a real expert. It was just written like an amateur. That said, who am I to pick on someone trying to improve their online presence?

Interesting - I mentally parsed that as "easy to try in my environment" and skipped right by the implication of "on the JVM it's very easy" as a Clojure/Scala degree-of-difficulty qualifier.

I actually found this article from a non-technical recruiter informative and do respect this effort from the author. It's nice to read from a recruiter who has taken, at first glance, a deeper look at functional programming in the marketplace and shares some insights. There's some hyperbole in the article, but it seems to be coming from a honest perspective.

Actually that may also be a side effect of the half lies techies tell to sell some technical orientations to management... Someone wanting to use Clojure or Scala will certainly use the JVM familiarity as a selling point.

Maybe they were talking about how easy is to find existing libraries that do what you need with that "pick up", instead how easy is "to learn" those languages for a Java dev?

Otherwise it makes little sense to me too. :)

" They are low risk simply because Scala/Clojure are built upon the JVM …meaning if tomorrow Scala/Clojure become obsolete, you get to retain the JVM."

Oh, well, of course.

I worked with Adbul when I got my current job. He's very capable and professional and I can strongly recommend him.

Usually the recruiter prefaces everything with "I'm nawwwwt reaaally a technical guuy, like I know code, dabbled a bit." A post like this is refreshing imo, at least he's looking to understand the landscape.

Who would design such a Web site (I'm trying to read it with Chrome so I'm not sure if it's a rendering issue specific to Chrome). What could be the purpose of squishing the content in the middle of a useless left column and gigantic, always-visible feedback form?

The space bar also can't be used to advance the content (in the three browsers I tried). I've been seeing this a lot lately in blogs and it's quite frustrating!

It can, once you add focus to that little content pane (and you have to do the same for the mouse wheel). Still baffling design, but slightly less broken.

The Haskell logo is backwards...

Is this the latest tactic of aggressive technical recruiters?

Interesting though this article is, forgive me for calling out Oxford Knight here. For those not in the know they are just a recruitment company. One of those that are a constant hassle on LinkedIn. It seems telling them multiple times that I am not interested in a job in finance does not stem the flow of "Forgive me, you must get this all the time, but..." connection requests and InMails, or creepy profile views.

> connection requests and InMails, or creepy profile views.

Isn't LinkedIn suppose to be precisely for this? Also - creepy profile views? Wat.

You can just like feel that they're looking at your profile and salivating over your qualifications. Gross!

"One major American bank is pushing a JVM based language that supports functional programming (Scala) as a firm-wide technology. Another two major banks are using Clojure for both real-time risk and pricing, and risk reporting."

Any ideas which banks?

"He then gives examples of companies like Morgan Stanley in London adopting Scala heavily. This type of adoption could be a great asset for Scala's adoption or it can be a touchstone of regret that people point to when deciding to use Scala. He fears that Morgan Stanley might have a hard time finding the right Scala developers for their projects, and Scala skills are rare. If, for example, unguided recruiters recruit nascent Scala developers, Scala projects' success could become difficult."

http://www.infoq.com/articles/barriers-to-scala-adoption

Good find, thanks. You've quoted a good part, too - it's something Scala is particularly prone to given how many ways there are of using it.

One thing I've seen is a cautious adoption of Akka in distributed systems in capital markets (grid services for analysis computations being one example). First-class Scala support in Akka is encouraging those banks to take a look for specific projects.

He missed Erlang, heavily used at Wall Street.

I'd believe the headline "The fall of COBOL programming in Banks" but this one just makes me laugh.

> Easier to write concurrent programs

Yeah, sure.

The funny thing is, they were worried about concurrent programming in the 80s too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

Guess what, there was no real crisis then either...

But hasn't CPU speed peaked? Moors law? Meaning that future performance is going to come from concurrency?

Abdul Muhit

They thought that in the 80s too! Read the page...

There is nothing new in computing, every 10 years the same things come round again and again. That's why old geezers like me become cynics.

Whilst they may have thought of concurrency problems in the 80s as you outline, the problem of concurrency (and subsequently performance) appears to be a bit more genuine now. Processing power has peaked...fact. Now with most PC's being shipped with multi-processors the need for concurrent software is a real one.

I do appreciate that there is an enormous list of things that are important right now, that software engineers have to worry about such as good user experience, proper abstraction, security, encryption, privacy, reusability, reliable data storage, good recovery etc etc

However to dismiss concurrency issues in a world with peaked processing powers on a single CPU as something of a fashion-fad! Doesn’t sound to me as in synch with what i've been observing.

Would be nice to hear from others on this1

Ask yourself this: why is removing the GIL a very low priority for the Python community? Or why has the GIL not slowed the adoption of Python, esp. in financial services?

A. Because it’s not easy to remove GIL according to Guido van van Rossumn. It’s an issue and the fact the python community are talking about it means concurrency is an issue.

B. Your last comment points to one language and the complexity of adapting it vs ignoring wider argument that there is a greater need for concurrency to add performance than what there was in the 80’s when CPU’s got faster ever year.

c. You almost indicate that despite the GIL banks are using python and therefore must be less concerned with concurrency. This is not the case because GIL in no way stops concurrent programming from happening in a single Python process. The only constraint the GIL places on multi-threaded applications is that a single Python process cannot execute multiple threads simultaneously. You can still run multiple threads.

a) it's a nice to have, but the lack of it hadn't hurt the adoption rate of Python. So that's not it.

b) computers nowadays are insanely fast - so fast that we use high level languages like Python instead of assembly. So that's not it.

c) that makes no sense. There is no point in threading without concurrency! So that's not it either.

There is no multi core crisis now, just as there was no transputer crisis back then. Only people trying to sell stuff.

I'm flagging this as recruiter spam.

I don't think it's spam. Insight into tends in technology adoption are pretty interesting to me. Shouldn't we also encourage recruiters that give any kind of a shit about the tech they recruit for? If there was more of that around maybe I'd get less of the monkey "I see you haz teh skillz" type spam I get in my inbox all the time!

Of course it's spam - normal people wouldn't capitalise Banks like that. Also no one says high freq when they mean HFT. And most HFT shops aren't really hedge funds, they're prop traders...

It is not a spam, I can assure you. I found that article and thought it was interesting just because of the subject of it. I thought the trend of functional programming becoming popular in banks would be interesting to other HN readers, too, that's the only reason I've submitted the link. I'm a programmer, not a recruiter, and I'm not affiliated with Oxford Knights or any other recruitment agency.

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