[Haskell-cafe] why are trading/banking industries seriously adopting FPLs???

[Neil Davies]

Trustworthiness

It provides the means of constructing systems that can be reasoned  
about, in which the risks of mistakes can be assessed, in which  
concurrency can be exploited without compromising those properties.

I once sat on a plane with a guy who ran a company that made software  
to move money around markets, he was really pleased that they could  
handle up to 60 transactions a second. They would take a money moment  
(say $5B) split it into 'maximum risk units' and engage in the  
conversion between the two currencies. Given the nature of the  
distributed transaction, the way in which the commitment process  
operated what was *really* important was managing the overall risk of  
currency fluctuation in the partially completed distributed  
transactions. His typical employee at the time (this was about 8-10  
years ago) was a good PhD in quantum chromodynamics - they had the  
ability to think about the 'all possible futures' that the code had to  
handle. (yes I did my FP evangelisation bit)

That company, with today's Haskell, could start from a simple,  
obviously correct, description of the issues and evolve a solution -  
knowing that, with equational reasoning, referential transparency and  
other properties, the transformations were 'safe'. Doesn't mean you  
don't test - does mean you can do more with your good staff.

I've used some of the techniques that are in the haskell libraries  
(esp. iteratee's and dsl's) in developing s/w for intrustion detection  
companies in the past - granted they were not actually running GHC  
code - but specialised C coming out of a DSL

Neil


On 25 Mar 2011, at 07:08, Vasili I. Galchin wrote:

> Hello,
>
>      I am very curious about the readiness of trading and banking  
> industries to adopt FPLs like Haskell: http://talenteze.catsone.com/careers/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrderID=466095 
>  .... I currently work in the computer security(intrusion  
> detection). My colleagues are totally ignorant concerning the  
> foundations/motivations of FPLs. (Ironically http://www.galois.com  
> participates in the computer security arena!). Why are are trading/ 
> banking diving into FPLs?
>
> Regards,
>
> Vasili
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