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

cnbc.com

51–60 of 62 posts

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

#51
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?

A license without people who know how to make it tick isn't worth much. Maybe the hard-core Slang/SecDB technical support and development staff just aren't numerous enough to split into two viable groups?

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

#52
post #38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was interviewing at GS we talked about Python vs Slang and several of the interviewers mentioned the biggest problem with slang was the lack of toolkit (good debuggers, IDE, etc.).

It's also worth noting that the SEC thinks python is a good language for specing ABS. http://kelloggfinance.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/the-sec-gets-...

I remember I see people using some sort of old fashioned Basic like IDE with blue screen and yellow fonts to work on it. Do not know if it has improved.

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

#53
post #3
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/ .

and Slang is used for bootstrapping squeak (smalltalk).

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

#54
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well just in case you wanna cry into your beer over that font - you can get it here for old times sake.

http://www.aplusdev.org/Download/x11fonts.tar.gz

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

#55
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well just in case you wanna cry into your beer over that font - you can get it here for old times sake. http://www.aplusdev.org/Download/x11fonts.tar.gz

nooooooooooooooooooooo

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

#57
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…

Didn't GS have a losing second quarter? Perhaps this spin-off has more to do with how they perceive the next quarter is going too, and worries about business beyond that.

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

#58
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…

"Like a spreadsheet, it only needs to recompute the subgraph that has changed."

Yes that's right - and that is a key feature for GS - they need to be able to revalue huge trading books ~ real time. (Most other banks estimate impact of intraday moves, and do a re-price overnight in batch)

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

#60
post #59

I thought Slang was a static subset Smalltalk used to implement virtual machines, like PreScheme (Scheme48) and Restricted Python (PyPy).

Also, the JED editor has an extension language of that name. It was my editor of choice during the late 90s, and I also used Slang as a scripting language in my youthful attempts at adventure games.

http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/

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