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Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

cnbc.com

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Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#11

Post by mrduncan »

logicalmind wrote: post #4

I read this article a while back, that said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretary's that any other company in the world. They took stock options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this picture, of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrari. Blew my mind. you see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think its possible, even easy. And then you turn on the TV,…

Mike Rowe's TED talk from 2008 hits on some of the same points, as well as how much he thinks we under-value hard work. Agree with him or not, it's definitely worth taking a look at.

http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#12

Post by lrm242 »

A relevant thread from Wilmott Forums: http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid...

In particular, this quote from Dominic Connor is telling:

"...[snip]... As Zmei says [SLang] a GS only language, which even within GS is not exactly universally loved. I hear tales of tragically poor performance, and the inability to cope with modern programming. Think of it as a equivalent to C# 1.0, ie old fashioned.

I don't know how much it is seen as protecting IP, but it is not clear how GS can give it up within the next decade even if they tried. There is just so much of it there.

There are spots of Java, VBA, and C++ in GS, who often value C++ experience in new hires, even if they don't use it.

The GS IT bonus pool is better than most people's IT bonus pool, but it's several tiers down. Mobility is no worse at GS than many other firms, but that is not saying much of course. Slang does in this context work to your advantage. Many IT department technologies have no value in quant and/or front office roles, but since Slang is prevalent in all aspects of GS, this barrier is much smaller. But of course the politics in all banks is far more of a problem than the technology."

Dominic is a very well known Quant head hunter. Well informed and generally well liked within the community. I'd wager that they don't want to use Slang in the spinoff simply because they have a change to do a reset and don't want the baggage.

Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#13

Post by jbooth »

jrockway wrote: post #7

At initial stages, potential recruits are not even told that Goldman is the client. Well, yeah. That's because if the recruiter tells you where the job is, you'll go directly to the client and keep the 30% of your salary that the recruiter gets to yourself.

Of course, at places like Goldman (in stark contrast to the Cloudera blog post the other week), coming in through a recruiter actually increases your chance of getting the job and a high salary. The recruiter can be the door-banger who pushes your paperwork through the organization and demands a high salary, while you get to be mild-mannered, not desperate for employment, and not a prima donna about money.

Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#14

Post by gnuvince »

RexRollman wrote: post #9
atomical wrote: post #8

The "Why" is missing in this article. Anyone care to comment?

What I would like to know is why didn't they simply license it to them?

Most likely because they cannot afford to risk that someone will steal the intellectual property of their slow and bug-ridden language implementation.

Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#16

Post by hga »

gnuvince wrote: post #14
RexRollman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I would like to know is why didn't they simply license it to them?

Most likely because they cannot afford to risk that someone will steal the intellectual property of their slow and bug-ridden language implementation.

Well, there's one big advantage to the whole Slang system and that is that it's integrated throughout the company and the system can be used for relatively quick "what if?" and "where do we stand?" queries. Instead of the data being embedded in a zillion (often incorrect) spreadsheets and small databases or whatever that have to be manually scraped, reported and consolidated, it all happens automatically. It may not be "fast" but it's a lot faster than manual methods.

ADDED: see this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581604

Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#17

Post by gaius »

stuntprogrammer wrote: post #15

There's a long history of using alternative in-house languages at Wall St. firms (and new ones are being developed at a few large firms I know).

Morgan Stanley and others were big users of APL, back in the day. Now that's a wacky language!

Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#18

Post by endtime »

logicalmind wrote: post #4

I read this article a while back, that said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretary's that any other company in the world. They took stock options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this picture, of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrari. Blew my mind. you see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think its possible, even easy. And then you turn on the TV,…

How is this at all relevant to GS porting their code to a standard programming language?

Re: Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

#19

Post by stuntprogrammer »

gaius wrote: post #17
stuntprogrammer wrote: post #15

There's a long history of using alternative in-house languages at Wall St. firms (and new ones are being developed at a few large firms I know).

Morgan Stanley and others were big users of APL, back in the day. Now that's a wacky language!

APL isn't all that weird once you spend a little time with it. It's "just" a dynamically typed collection-oriented language. I think people look at some screenshots, make a stupid joke since they aren't familiar with the notation, and move on rather than digging in. I highly recommend Dyalog's dialect for a comfortable IDE, OO support, .NET support for GUIs on Windows etc.

For MS' APL dialect, you can get the whole thing from: http://www.aplusdev.org/

My understanding is that they still have many many lines of code written in this language running. They also use a commercial intellectual successor of this language called q from kx systems. Many other firms do as well, but I won't name them since I don't know which ones are public about it.

I'm pretty sure that the firms I know creating new languages are not public about it, but there are at least 3 very very large ones doing so. Aiming for a functional flavor, large-scale parallelism, streaming, low-latency processing of large data sets, high-quality compilation and leveraging new hardware are common themes.

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