Caml trading – experiences with functional programming on Wall Street [pdf] or | Hacker News Reader

Caml trading – experiences with functional programming on Wall Street [pdf] or

janestreetcapital.com

60 pointsmbrubeck10 comments

This was an interesting read. You see lots of puff pieces telling you why you should use a language, but here's a sober experienced voice explaining how ocaml worked out for them. Warts and all. The warts are the most important part to know about.

It's sort of interesting what's happening in the finance industry today. You see less and less java/c# and more erlang, ocaml and ADA.

The CS geeks won out.

It's very interesting. This Jane St. video had a big influence on my decision to spend some time learning ocaml:

http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61

At about 29:30 "You basically can't pay people enough to carefully review dull code."

I found that very insightful.

Sorry to come back to this thread so late. But I'd like to add that I find Jane Street's sober, mature view to be very attractive. Not the usual pastel-coloured-hype you get from dotcoms, or Button-down-idiocy you get from corporate work but a very appealing no nonsense intellectual approach.

If I were looking for a job they'd be in my top 10. That is all, carry on.

I've given talks there and Jane Street is awesome. Just my 2c.

"In short, programmers may sometimes avoid the same features that make OCaml such a pleasant language to program with. It is possible to address this problem by using more aggressive optimization techniques (e.g., whole-program optimization as is used in the MLton Standard ML compiler (MLton, 2007)). Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that such optimization will be available any time soon for OCaml."

Then why OCaml over Standard ML using the MLton implementation?

He answers this: because OCaml is a much better "Unix citizen". Also, SML is a frozen standard, whereas OCaml is actively developed.

Never could adapt to OCaml's undisciplined syntax. SML's is clean. MLTon is very nice with a couple of limitations, practical upper bound of program size and compilation times.

One of the co-authors, S. Weeks, was (is?) one of the core MLTon compiler developers. If feasible they certainly could have evolved the compiler and the SML language.

Somewhat interesting is F# lost out to Ocaml in a bakeoff.

In a way Jane St. has got themselves in a bit of a corner. I don't see how Ocaml is substantially less moribund then SML.

Here is an interesting thought to mull over. With the upcoming 2.8 Scala compiler _every_ substantive feature of (S/C)ML is available with equal or higher capability.

In other words, strike out use of objects in Scala and one is left with the most advanced (and active) MLs around. Hmm...

The revised syntax (camlp4) is much more regular, that's the only one I use.

Definitely worth a read. They discuss which language features gave them advantage and disadvantage and so the lessons can be used by programmers in many other languages as well.

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