[ruang]

Interesting that he's going to a financial technology consulting firm whose products include algorithmic trading. It seems like that would be one of the last spaces to be interested in a dynamic scripting language versus pure speed.

[ubernostrum]

It seems like that would be one of the last spaces to be interested in a dynamic scripting language versus pure speed.

Game developers learned the trick, a while back, of writing things like low-level graphics engines in C/C++, and then high-level control/flow/UI/plugin systems/etc. in "slow"-to-run but "fast"-to-develop-in languages. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if there were also plenty of tasks in the finance world which need code, but don't need hand-optimized-down-to-the-individual-instructions performance.

[petercooper]

C++ and C# are big deals in the financial industry, but remember that programmer time is a lot more expensive than hardware time, and there could be wins to be had in extremely rapid development.

[ruang]

Good point, hadn't thought of that. A dynamic scripting language could be useful for backtesting as opposed to execution.

[rbanffy]

> It seems like that would be one of the last spaces to be interested in a dynamic scripting language versus pure speed.

First make it work. Then, make it fast.

It's easier to optimize a correct program than to fix an optimized, but broken, one.

[corprew]

if you're planning on making wall street-level profits, the incremental server farm costs are probably pretty small by comparison