[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell in Industry

[Casey Hawthorne]

Of course Banks/Financial Firms/Investment Banks want software that is
correct, secure, and logs transactions.

Aspects are great for cross-cutting concerns like security and
logging; as in AspectJ.

For correctness, functional programming has that.

With monads its easy to add logging and security.

Something the BCLC (British Columbia Lottery Corporation) has missed
entirely. :)


On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:05:50 +0800, you wrote:

>Remember that Banks/Financial Firms/Investment Banks were among the first big uses of punch card readers, mainframes, cobol, C, C++ (and OOP), VBA, Java..  I'm not saying if I like any of those languages (my presence on this list should give a clue how I feel) but investment banks picking up FP and Haskell bodes quite well for Haskell in the future.
>
>Max
>
>On Aug 10, 2010, at 12:59 AM, Tom Hawkins wrote:
>
>>> Good, we need more functional programmers actually solving real
>>> problems.  But please put your skills to work in an industry other
>>> than investment banking.
>> 
>> I've received a lot mail on this comment; mostly positive.  Here's one
>> from someone who wishes to remain anonymous:
>> 
>>> First of all I would like to say that I like your work regarding e.g.
>>> Atom. Second, I would like to know what exactly is bad about a Haskell
>>> job in investment banking as a lot of good programmers work in this
>>> industry.
>> 
>> It's disproportionate.  95% of the job offerings in functional
>> programming are with investment firms.  I believe investment banking
>> is important, but does it really need to dominate a large percentage
>> of the world's top tier programmers?  Is computing the risk of
>> derivative contracts more important than pursuing sustainable energy,
>> new drug discovery, improving crop yields, etc.  Some will argue
>> investment banking enables all of these things -- and I'm sure many
>> people in the industry go to work everyday feeling proud of their
>> contributions.  But I just think most of this talent is going in to
>> improve the bottom line and little else.
>> 
>> (Yes, I realize that's were the money is, and that's who's hiring.
>> Actually I'm very glad.  Investment banking is the first industry to
>> adopt functional programming on a large scale.  And others will
>> follow.)
>> 
>> -Tom


--
Regards,
Casey