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Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

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Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#101

Post by gambler »

lordmatty wrote: post #95
corin_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between "you can't open source some/all of our code" and "you can't work on unrelated open source projects in your free time".

I agree. I can't say I like standard practise of employers owning everything their employees do whether in or out of work, or requiring that you stop anything they don't own. However, this is hardly something that is limited to Goldmans or financial services. I'm pretty sure that Apple require you not to work on side projects, for example. We had a discussion regarding this at my company - Future Workshops - last wee…

Let's not call this a "standard" practice. In my experience, most companies do no make claims to your off-the-hours projects. And that is how it should be. Unless you're doing some cutting edge AI research or something of that sort, this kind of legal claim is just paranoid stupidity. Even if you do cutting edge AI research, it shouldn't entitle your employer to own a phpBB patch you've done in your free time.

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#102

Post by arcdrag »

hermanhermitage wrote: post #60
jrockway wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's the concise model that can't scale without tool support. Imagine you import foo.∗, bar.∗, and baz.∗. How does someone reading the code know where the Quux class comes from? They can't, without checking all of the namespaces that were imported. But if you just "import foo.bar.baz.Quux", then you know exactly where Quux comes from. This whole thread sounds like a lot of non-java-programmers complaining…

I'm not too fussed with the namespaces - I dont think you will find anyone arguing against that. What is at issue is the over specialization of class or framework components because of language limitations. A language that leads to degenerate boilerplate or mounds of endless repetition (but in user land code and libraries/frameworks) can be viewed as having a serious abstraction problem. Do you really think java will…

Do you think that 100 years from now, anyone other than programming language researchers will have heard of any programming language used today?

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#103

Post by DanBC »

arcdrag wrote: post #102
hermanhermitage wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too fussed with the namespaces - I dont think you will find anyone arguing against that. What is at issue is the over specialization of class or framework components because of language limitations. A language that leads to degenerate boilerplate or mounds of endless repetition (but in user land code and libraries/frameworks) can be viewed as having a serious abstraction problem. Do you really think java will…

Do you think that 100 years from now, anyone other than programming language researchers will have heard of any programming language used today?

Do you think 40 years ago people would have thought that people would still be using C (and derivatives)?

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#105

Post by vrepsys »

nemanja-mit wrote: post #42
chrishenn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We believe in the power of the technical community to help improve GS Collections.” They aren't accepting code contributions right now, so that doesn't make much sense.

It's a recruiting tool, that's all. They want to be a bit open sourcey to attract top talent. The broken unit test battery that comes with it is a job interview tool.

I would guess this was initiated by IT employees (open sourcing the library might make life easier for them, assuming someone outside the company contributes) and approved by top managers (because it's good for recruitment and makes their IT staff happier).

However I would doubt this will make a big difference when attracting top talent. One important reason for that being (IMO) that the best IT people prefer innovative technologies and GS uses a proprietary in-house programming language and db for everything that's important. Some say their tech was perhaps innovative 25 years ago http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-sac... .

Not to mention that if you work for GS you lock yourself in those in-house techs. When I went to a job interview at GS and asked what the advantages of using an in-house language and db were, I was told that it's very hard to hack their systems, because no one else uses them (Not sure how valid this argument actually is though).

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#106

Post by f45s8g2 »

jlarocco wrote: post #9

... import com.gs.collections.impl.block.factory.Comparators; import com.gs.collections.impl.block.factory.Functions; import com.gs.collections.impl.block.procedure.CollectionAddProcedure; import com.gs.collections.impl.collection.mutable.AbstractCollectionAdapter; ... Gees, I feel sorry for people still stuck using Java.

If they, i.e. the rest of the company outside of the IT department, don't know how much better things could be with something smaller and faster, then it really does not matter.

Oracle has had companies locked in for decades. And they have developers locked in. They are like Microsoft.

Maybe Github and more open source visibility is the beginning of a change.

It is exposing what Java really is: to some observers it is a bloated mess.

When we have internal corporate use cases of Java being made public like this, more comparisons of doing these tasks in other languages can be performed by people outside the company, and I have no doubt we will see some benchmarks done. And we may see that Java is slower than other alternatives.

Peer review, via putting things in an open repository, might be a powerful force for improvement in software.

But if I were Oracle, Microsoft or another company that tries to lock in business customers, which only promotes its own software and does little to advance the state of the art (or even actively inhibits it, e.g. killing OpenSolaris) I would not be too happy with this trend.

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#107

Post by xxpor »

tar wrote: post #62
sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #47

There are a few other brands on there, including Walmart and Amazon: https://github.com/walmartlabs http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/walmartlabs_kosmix.php https://github.com/amazonwebservices I can imagine Goldmans are using Github to acquire talent and new ideas. I am sure they have some complex problems and technology that needs fixing. Stack Exchange had a discussion on this last year: http://programmers.stac…

I don't think Amazon being on Github is really that surprising.

It is if you work at Amazon ;)

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#108

Post by f45s8g2 »

eddie_the_head wrote: post #40
joshu wrote: post #34

Heh. Morgan Stanley open sourced Aplus a long time ago.

Have you ever used it or any other APL? I'm currently getting familiar with K, which is the language Whitney and the company he founded (Kx Systems) after he left Morgan Stanley made, but from an open source implementation called Kona by Kevin Lawler and Scott Vokes: https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona

There was someone on Kuro5hin some years ago who called k an Excel replacement. The more I use kona (which isn't very much), the more I believe he was right.

It seems like a really nice little language. Much more agile than a "desktop spreadsheet program".

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#109

Post by edwinnathaniel »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #81
jrockway wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a vow to myself to never reply to a comment that used both "tactics" and "strategy" in the same sentence, but here goes... Why should programming be any different? The very best IDEs in the hands of a skilled programmer should produce code better than a similarly skilled programmer who insists on using a dumb text editor. If the resulting code can only effectively be modified by a similar computer/human team -…

The speed and manner in which the full version of Visual Studio allows you to debug container objects and jump JIT to the code currently executing to look at the call stack and inspect variable values, is not superficial. As a text editor, code writing tool, sure it's not much better than a standard editor. As an IDE with a debugger it allows an experienced developer to debug faster and write better code more quickly…

Visual Studio is not Eclipse either.

IntelliJ is on par with Eclipse. Period. Let us put a stop into that topic.

Re: Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs Github Account

#110

Post by arcdrag »

jrockway wrote: post #70
bradleyjg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very best chess teams consist of a computers and a humans cooperating with each. The computer insures perfect tactically play while the human concentrates on overall strategy. Why should programming be any different? The very best IDEs in the hands of a skilled programmer should produce code better than a similarly skilled programmer who insists on using a dumb text editor. If the resulting code can only effectiv…

I made a vow to myself to never reply to a comment that used both "tactics" and "strategy" in the same sentence, but here goes... Why should programming be any different? The very best IDEs in the hands of a skilled programmer should produce code better than a similarly skilled programmer who insists on using a dumb text editor. If the resulting code can only effectively be modified by a similar computer/human team -…

The refactoring tools in IntelliJ make it possible to catch a lot of things that would be very difficult to do with emacs of vim. For example, I know a certain utility method exists in several different classes, so I want to extract that method and utilize it throughout my project. The IDE will search the project for any block of code that meets this pattern and will ask you if you want to replace it with this new utility class instead. For smaller projects (Also, if you're basing your IDE experience solely on Eclipse and Netbeans, give IntelliJ a try. Both Eclipse and Netbeans pretty much seem unusable after you use IntelliJ for a while.
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