

Caml trading – experiences with functional  programming on Wall Street [pdf] or - mbrubeck
http://www.janestreetcapital.com/minsky_weeks-jfp_18.pdf

======
spitfire
This was an interesting read. You see lots of puff pieces telling you why you
should use a language, but here's a sober experienced voice explaining how
ocaml worked out for them. Warts and all. The warts are the most important
part to know about.

It's sort of interesting what's happening in the finance industry today. You
see less and less java/c# and more erlang, ocaml and ADA.

The CS geeks won out.

~~~
look_lookatme
It's very interesting. This Jane St. video had a big influence on my decision
to spend some time learning ocaml:

<http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61>

~~~
spitfire
Sorry to come back to this thread so late. But I'd like to add that I find
Jane Street's sober, mature view to be very attractive. Not the usual pastel-
coloured-hype you get from dotcoms, or Button-down-idiocy you get from
corporate work but a very appealing no nonsense intellectual approach.

If I were looking for a job they'd be in my top 10. That is all, carry on.

~~~
Eliezer
I've given talks there and Jane Street is awesome. Just my 2c.

------
bravura
"In short, programmers may sometimes avoid the same features that make OCaml
such a pleasant language to program with. It is possible to address this
problem by using more aggressive optimization techniques (e.g., whole-program
optimization as is used in the MLton Standard ML compiler (MLton, 2007)).
Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that such optimization will be
available any time soon for OCaml."

Then why OCaml over Standard ML using the MLton implementation?

~~~
boskone
Never could adapt to OCaml's undisciplined syntax. SML's is clean. MLTon is
very nice with a couple of limitations, practical upper bound of program size
and compilation times.

One of the co-authors, S. Weeks, was (is?) one of the core MLTon compiler
developers. If feasible they certainly could have evolved the compiler and the
SML language.

Somewhat interesting is F# lost out to Ocaml in a bakeoff.

In a way Jane St. has got themselves in a bit of a corner. I don't see how
Ocaml is substantially less moribund then SML.

Here is an interesting thought to mull over. With the upcoming 2.8 Scala
compiler _every_ substantive feature of (S/C)ML is available with equal or
higher capability.

In other words, strike out use of objects in Scala and one is left with the
most advanced (and active) MLs around. Hmm...

~~~
gaius
The revised syntax (camlp4) is much more regular, that's the only one I use.

------
cema
Definitely worth a read. They discuss which language features gave them
advantage and disadvantage and so the lessons can be used by programmers in
many other languages as well.

