[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell in Industry

[Ben Moseley]

> Investment banking isn't likely to lead to improvements in zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms. 

Given that an investment bank could (purely hypothetically of course.... ;-) use - say - paramorphisms as their fundamental approach to processing a deeply-embedded DSEL, I wouldn't be too quick to rule them out of improvements to recursion combinators...

And, more generally, Investment Banking has interesting problems to solve, smart people working there, and a willingness to use (and improve) cutting-edge technology.

IMHO, all of these are good things.

--Ben

On 10 Aug 2010, at 19:56, wren ng thornton wrote:

> Henning Thielemann wrote:
>> about functional programming jobs in investment banking ...
>> Ketil Malde schrieb:
>>> Tom Hawkins <tomahawkins at gmail.com> writes:
>>>> (Yes, I realize that's were the money is [...])
>>> Exactly.
>>> 
>>> I don't think this is bad: having talented people recruited to work
>>> on functional programming will improve the technology for all of us.
>> I'm not sure I follow this opinion in general. Analogously I could say:
>> Supporting military is a good idea, since they invest in new
>> technologies. That's not my opinion. Maybe the next financial crisis
>> leads us into the next world war.
> 
> But that analogy is a bit disingenuous. If investment bankers care so much about performance (because a few milliseconds delay in transactions can cost a lot) then getting a lot of talented functional programmers in finance means there will be a good deal of work in figuring out how to improve performance. Thus, anyone who wants performance will benefit directly; regardless of attendant outcomes.
> 
> While the military invests in technology, they invest mainly in technology that advances a particular goal. Thus, it's good for them to have smart people if you would like improvements to that particular kind of technology. (Which includes the Internet and natural language processing ---for very militaristic reasons, both of them---, as well as the obvious.) Investment banking isn't likely to lead to improvements in zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms. If that's where you think we need to be improving our technology, then having smart people in investment banking doesn't help. But that's a different claim than the claim that they'd improve performance or overall acceptance in the job market.
> 
> -- 
> Live well,
> ~wren
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