An oral history of Bank Python (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)

#71

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #54

rbanffy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be. I got the same vibes with Zope, which is Python and has an object database underneath it. At the time I had the impression the idea was popular in finance.

I loved Zope (and ZODB). No matter what I said, I could never convince the higher-ups it was the way to go. In retrospect, they were probably right. But those technologies were magnificent.

Thanks to the Plone crowd, Zope now runs on Python 3 and still deserves some work. I’m not sure how to shoehorn Git-based workflows on top of it transparently, but I would still love to play with it.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)

#72

Post by scelerat » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

Thrymr wrote: post #15

elemeno wrote: post #8

To the best of my knowledge much of this originated with SecDB/Slang at Goldman - SecDB (securities db I believe) being the object store and slang the somewhat quirky C like language that ran with it (also the only language I’ve used professionally that let you have spaces in the variable names). Some of the folk that built that (or worked on it) ended up at JPM and Merrill where they built the Python centric version…

JPM's version was Athena (not Alpha) [0] [0] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/managing-python-at-scal...

Ha when I read “I won’t name the system; let’s just call it Minerva,” I thought, “I’ll bet it’s called Athena irl. “

Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)

#73

Post by bostik » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #62

simonh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on Quartz at BAML for 4 years, it was great. I met Kirat Singh once when he visited the UK, he took the basic concept from Goldman to JPM, then to BAML.

I was lucky enough to start my career sat on the next desk across from Kirat. Genius programmer and nice guy! He later went on to found Beacon platform which was the same again, as a cloud hosted service.

Yeah, and Beacon was acquired a year ago. The acquiring company in turn went private. Yesterday.

Genius coder, yes. Nice guy, most definitely yes.

Re: An oral history of Bank Python (2021)

#74

Post by TZubiri » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

nxobject wrote: post #65

TZubiri wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precision? Quite common in accounting, the accounting equation must balance, it's like a checksum

Yes, OP started the sentence with that. But, you do make me wonder if floating-point imprecision would eventually lead to material issues...

I can see of two main ways were such imprecision can have negative effects even if small.

1- As mentioned, even if pennies, it breaks integrity checks. Which may cause for them to be ignored, which can cause real integrity issues to be ignored if by coincidence they are small.

2- There was an article about this on hn recently, but, although science values dropping excess precision in an argument in favour of not inventing precision that isn't there, sometimes more digit precision can transmit information about the calculation of the numbers, for example we see a number 1.47528, whe can be fairly certain it is 1/7th of something. If we see 1.48, less so. A simpler example would be a single cent error leading to an X.99 value which is semantically different from a round one.