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

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

#41

Post by jerf »

ergo98 wrote: post #29
lrm242 wrote: post #12

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.…

C# 1.0? That's really your example of an old fashioned language?

Is it really such a terrible example? It was basically Java, but then dumbed down a bit, as I recall.

C# later evolved into a competitive, modern language, but that first release was distinctly underwhelming. Take a look at the closest thing to a changelog I could find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET#.NET_Framework_1... And I particularly draw your attention to the list of changes in 2.0, which include but are not limited to: Generics, 64-bit support, partial classes, nullable types, anonymous methods, and iterators. Maybe nullable types shouldn't be on that list, but a language without any of those things is getting pretty old fashioned.

Sure, C# 1.0 is no COBOL, but there was little or nothing new about C#, and I'd hesitate to even call it modern for the time, even if it would have been hailed as a major triumph in 1975.

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

#42

Post by waterside81 »

jabbslad wrote: post #39

"The problem is that Goldman's traders use a special computer language called "Slang" that was developed for internal use only." ^^^ What in God's name are traders doing going anywhere near a programming language? Surely this is some mistake.

Believe it or not, this is quite common in the industry. I developed some software for one of the Big 5 banks in Canada and I saw first hand traders learning to program using C++, Java, whatever they can get their hands on because they need to test out models, perform calculations that Excel can't do readily - although VBA is a trader's best friend.

Recently, they've been using R more and more. And as you'd imagine, their code is horrendous but hey, it works.

What I learned is that the entire financial industry relies on Excel and really bad programming. It's really scary to think that 37Signals has better software and software practices than a bank.

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

#43

Post by smcl »

jabbslad wrote: post #39

"The problem is that Goldman's traders use a special computer language called "Slang" that was developed for internal use only." ^^^ What in God's name are traders doing going anywhere near a programming language? Surely this is some mistake.

I'm with you, I just started for a finance-y company and was rather shocked to see various non-developer\IT people tabbing over to MS SQL Management Studio every few minutes, running queries and updating tables!

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

#44

Post by stuntprogrammer »

waterside81 wrote: post #42
jabbslad wrote: post #39

"The problem is that Goldman's traders use a special computer language called "Slang" that was developed for internal use only." ^^^ What in God's name are traders doing going anywhere near a programming language? Surely this is some mistake.

Believe it or not, this is quite common in the industry. I developed some software for one of the Big 5 banks in Canada and I saw first hand traders learning to program using C++, Java, whatever they can get their hands on because they need to test out models, perform calculations that Excel can't do readily - although VBA is a trader's best friend. Recently, they've been using R more and more. And as you'd imagine,…

Historically there has been some truly awful code, no doubt, and much still being written.

There is a growing breed of trader though who can code well. Coding well in a variety of languages is becoming a basic skill along with advanced math & stats for certain types of trading jobs.

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

#45

Post by stuntprogrammer »

joshu wrote: post #35
stuntprogrammer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

For what its worth, a+ was mostly used in the fixed income decision. Over in equities, I never touched it - most of my work was in perl and SAS.

True - joel kaplan's group in FID was the source iirc.

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

#46

Post by fmw »

unwind wrote: post #3
c1sc0 wrote: post #2

"Snake" in Dutch ... how appropriate.

"Hose" in Swedish, which I also found amusing. :) Also, S-lang is the name of at least one well-known programming language, it's used to script the jed editor among other things. See http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/ .

In Dutch, "hose" is another meaning of slang as well.

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

#47

Post by borisk »

jerf wrote: post #41
ergo98 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# 1.0? That's really your example of an old fashioned language?

Is it really such a terrible example? It was basically Java, but then dumbed down a bit, as I recall. C# later evolved into a competitive, modern language, but that first release was distinctly underwhelming. Take a look at the closest thing to a changelog I could find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET#.NET_Framework_1... And I particularly draw your attention to the list of changes in 2.0, which include b…

>>It was basically Java, but then dumbed down a bit, as I recall.

C# 1.0 had all the important features of Java 1.4 plus delegates, events, autoboxing, enumerations, operator overloading, indexers, foreach and a lot more.

IMHO 90% of enterprise developers today are using the features from C# 1.0/Java 1.2 + generics. It's not some Prolog/Lisp/Haskel clone, but far from old fashioned.

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

#48

Post by joshu »

stuntprogrammer wrote: post #45
joshu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what its worth, a+ was mostly used in the fixed income decision. Over in equities, I never touched it - most of my work was in perl and SAS.

True - joel kaplan's group in FID was the source iirc.

didn't stop every fucking aurora machine from bitching about missing kaplgallant though. heh.

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

#49

Post by silverlake »

retube wrote: post #33

Slang is a proprietory language developed by GS, it's been around for ~15 years I think. If I remember correctly they have a development/analysis environment called SecDB in which all coding is done with Slang. All their modelling, pricing and risking is done in SecDB across all asset classes so it's pretty widely embedded.

I've looked at Slang a bit. It's an interpreted dataflow language running on an in-memory database called SecDB. Untyped, Pascal-ish, single-threaded, and poor support for namespaces. Like a spreadsheet, it only needs to recompute the subgraph that has changed. It was probably innovative 25 years ago (I think it came out mid-80s), but today you could write Java code and use memoization aggressively to speed things up. Slang is not why GS traders are successful. AFAIK, GS succeeds because they listen to their risk people.

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

#50

Post by hga »

silverlake wrote: post #49
retube wrote: post #33

Slang is a proprietory language developed by GS, it's been around for ~15 years I think. If I remember correctly they have a development/analysis environment called SecDB in which all coding is done with Slang. All their modelling, pricing and risking is done in SecDB across all asset classes so it's pretty widely embedded.

I've looked at Slang a bit. It's an interpreted dataflow language running on an in-memory database called SecDB. Untyped, Pascal-ish, single-threaded, and poor support for namespaces. Like a spreadsheet, it only needs to recompute the subgraph that has changed. It was probably innovative 25 years ago (I think it came out mid-80s), but today you could write Java code and use memoization aggressively to speed things up…

By embedding so much info company wide in SecDB aren't their risk people in a better position to make their case?

Still, that wouldn't matter if GS wasn't inclined to listen to them, but the whole Slang/SecDB system is indicative of a company culture that's serious about these sorts of things.

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