Re: [Haskell-cafe] why are trading/banking industries seriouslyadopting FPLs???

[Richard O'Keefe]

Smalltalk and Haskell share an interesting property:
they support integer and rational calculations without arbitrary limits.
Recording money in cents, 32 bits gives you ±$21,474,836.47, which is
not a large sum of money to the industries in question.  OK, 64 bits
effectively solves that problem, but 64-bit arithmetic hasn't been
available in mainstream languages all _that_ long.

Of course Java provides BigInteger, but not using the same notation as
ordinary integer arithmetic.  If you are keen on code review, code that
you *can* review is important.

Smalltalk and Haskell share another property:
higher order functions.  I was profiling some Smalltalk code the other
day and the call stack was regularly about 28 levels deep, thanks to
lots of reusable control structures with little lambdas plugged in.

It's not _that_ much of a stretch to see Haskell as a strongly typed
version of Smalltalk, without the pervasive mutability.

There's one enormous difference between Haskell and Smalltalk.
If you push hard on a Smalltalk library, whether it's a free
Smalltalk like GNU Smalltalk or Squeak, or a commercial one like
[I'd better not say], you will find code designed for the *usual*
case that doesn't actually work in all the cases you might expect.
For example, try
h := Heap withAll: #(3 1 4 1 5 9).
h addAll: h.
There's nothing inherent in Smalltalk that means this _couldn't_
work; in my Smalltalk it does.  But that's because I thought about
it, instead of taking the usual view the programmer ought to know
better than to try that.

I'd expect big-money companies that liked Smalltalk to like
stricter/safer functional languages even better, given a good
development environment.



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Re: [Haskell-cafe] why are trading/banking industries seriouslyadopting FPLs???

[Claus Reinke]

I am very curious about the readiness of trading and banking
industries to adopt FPLs like Haskell:
.. Why are are trading/banking diving into FPLs?


Some possible reasons have been given, but to keep things
in perspective, you might want to consider that it isn't just
FPLs. Smalltalk, for instance, got some mileage out of finance
sector success stories. Happily, there is at least one showcase
with some documentation:

   http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/successes/financial-services/jpmorgan/

if you don't see the pdf there, it is

JPMorgan Derives Clear Benefits From Cincom SmalltalkT
   http://www.cincom.com/pdf/CS040819-1.pdf

Comparing the claims in there (attributed to Dr. Colin Lewis,
Vice President, JPMorgan) with similar ones in Haskell success
stories might yield some clues:

With such a high productivity factor
that Smalltalk gives us, reaction times to
market changes have enabled us to
beat most of our competitors.

We have estimated that if we had built
Kapital in another language such as
Java, we would require at least three
times the amount of resources.

The key is that our development
resources do not have to be Smalltalk
experts.

Now a benchmark game comparing financial success of
Haskell, Smalltalk, Java, .. -backed companies, that would
be something. But it would still not account for the quality
of programmers that came with the language.

Claus



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