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Leaving Microsoft

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Re: Leaving Microsoft

#91

Post by crntaylor »

elemeno wrote: post #59
_delirium wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more true in certain Enterprisey, conservative parts of the financial world, backoffice bank records and that kind of thing. In investment/quant/trading parts there's more experimentation with other languages, both functional languages like F#, and even particularly "weird" languages like K (an APL successor).

My rule of thumb these days is that the smaller and more obscure the hedge fund, the more likely it is that they're using an unusual set of languages. The more PhDs they have, the more likely they're using something weird like K!

I used K (well, actually the combination of Q and kdb+) in my previous job at an investment bank, and I've used it (to a lesser degree) in my current job at a hedge fund (disclaimer: I have a PhD...).

K/Q is a beautiful language - it's uncompromisingly terse, extremely powerful, and very fast. The interop with kbd+ (a lightning fast, column-oriented, in-memory database) is gorgeous.

It has an unfortunate reputation for obscurity, stemming mainly from the people who think it's fun to write your entire program as a K one-liner and remove all the whitespace. You can write perfectly clear code in Q - super modular, concise, and well documented. It's just that a lot of Q programmers don't bother.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#93

Post by jheriko »

vitalique wrote: post #52
tensor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tempting to down vote him, but at the same time this is a real sentiment that some people seem to have. Perhaps it should be grouped into the current anti-intellectual trend. Either way, it's a real problem.

>It's tempting to down vote him Why? Ignoring the ignorance does no good. Trend you've mentioned is nothing new, sadly, but if you are on the weaker side (the one that intellectuals always tend to find themselves on), the way to win is not to try to down vote clueless guys into the light-grey invisibility, imo, but to try to explain to them what's wrong with their view of the world.

What is so ignorant about the statement? Enlighten me...

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#94

Post by jlouis »

eta_carinae wrote: post #44
smenyp wrote: post #4

FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic. This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). Currently, FB seems to use has…

> The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). There is very little evidence of that. Do a search for Scala, Clojure or Haskell on the main indicator web sites (job boards, StackOverflow, TIOBE, indeed.com, etc...) and you'll find they are as insignificant today as they were five years ago compared to the mainstream languages.

Job boards have one weakness: They reflect supply and demand. There is not much demand for Scala programmers. This may be because all positions are filled. Or, a more probable cause, that Scala programmers are not hired on Job boards.

Note that I have had 5-6 Jobs. I do FP for a living. And I have never been hired through a Job board advert. I think this is common with many FP people. Usually, when you want to hire FP people, you go to the mailing lists and community and get the guys you need. It is much more effective, but it won't show up in the Job board search at all.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#96

Post by tangue »

kmavm wrote: post #51
chriseidhof wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been doing that for a while. One of the major projects was/is HipHop, a PHP to C++ compiler.

Hey, I'm an engineer on the HipHop team, and a minor-league Haskell enthusiast. A couple clarifications: 1. HipHop is itself written in C++. While this did not logically need to be the case, it is the case. 2. These days our JIT compiler, the HipHop VM (hhvm) is out-performing the PHP-to-C++ ahead-of-time compiler. HHVM is under the HipHop umbrella, and so is also written in C++. If you're vaguely aware that Facebook…

Didn't know about HHVM. Clearly Facebook deserves more credit for all of these gems.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#97

Post by pjmlp »

smenyp wrote: post #63
eta_carinae wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support). There is very little evidence of that. Do a search for Scala, Clojure or Haskell on the main indicator web sites (job boards, StackOverflow, TIOBE, indeed.com, etc...) and you'll find they are as insignificant today as they were five years ago compared to the mainstream languages.

Anecdotally (n=1, of course) I have seen and heard tremendous resistance to clisp in the industry I work in 5 years ago. Now, clojure and Scala are being adopted and recommended by even conservative PMs and architects. The choices are way more today (Almost a tautology given old choices don't really vanish into thin air) and on more reliable platforms with tried and tested libraries. anyway the spirit with which i me…

My new recent project is in .NET and I happily using all functional like features C# 4.0 offers.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#98

Post by pjmlp »

gclaramunt wrote: post #56
jheriko wrote: post #24

i'm assuming this guy has done real world work before? the idea of a compiler/language lead programmer effectively having lived in academia is terrifying on many levels. best of luck to him at any rate. haskell and ghc are a cool language and compiler combo, one i have enjoyed for recreational programming time and time again.

err... do you know that (since 1.4 IIRC) the java compiler is the one written by Martin Odersky?

Wasn't 1.5?

Martin's work was related to generics, which got introduced in 1.5.

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#99

Post by fhars »

pjmlp wrote: post #98
gclaramunt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

err... do you know that (since 1.4 IIRC) the java compiler is the one written by Martin Odersky?

Wasn't 1.5? Martin's work was related to generics, which got introduced in 1.5.

It was 1.3, but the interesting features were disabled in production builds until 1.5, http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-0-prefa...

Re: Leaving Microsoft

#100

Post by pjmlp »

fhars wrote: post #99
pjmlp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't 1.5? Martin's work was related to generics, which got introduced in 1.5.

It was 1.3, but the interesting features were disabled in production builds until 1.5, http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-0-prefa...

Thanks for the clarification.
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