On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 09:45:36 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
Jane Street are indeed well-known and well-renowned for their
work with OCaml. It works for them but remains a small niche
with little traction.
Perhaps, but my point is that there's a company that adopted a
less-known language without starting out with any grand plan to
do so, and they clearly have contributed very substantially to
that language community in terms of money and I would guess code
(as well as hiring key people from Ocaml community).
Bloomberg actually do a significant amount of indirect
give-back for C++ and a little for Java: they do a lot of
sponsoring of C++ events and have staff on standards
committees. We at ACCUConf like Bloomberg.
I haven't been aware of Scala give-back from Morgan Stanley, I
shall hunt it out. The organizations I know using Scala
generally stay pretty quiet about it other than they are using
it. Ditto for Python.
So perhaps you might agree that just the few examples that
immediately came to mind demonstrate that it isn't the case
finance doesn't and wouldn't give back. I don't know the details
of MS involvement with Scala (except that they use it), but a
Scala guy I talked to was concerned that they were having too
much influence of the development of the language - so I guess
there must have been some money and code involved.
Finance is just one more industry, but it's quite a pragmatic
one and still has a decent share of global IT spending.
I have made quite a lot of my income over the last 7 years from
finance industry, commercial banking and hedge funds, I am not
complaining. :-)
Glad to hear. But maybe in that context one should be thoughtful
about suggesting entire industries are unpromising targets. It's
quite heterogeneous, and hard to speak in broadbush terms.
