
Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang" - jsm386
http://www.cnbc.com/id/38584613
======
lrm242
A relevant thread from Wilmott Forums:
[http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid...](http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid=59857)

In particular, this quote from Dominic Connor is telling:

"...[snip]... As Zmei says [SLang] a GS only language, which even within GS is
not exactly universally loved. I hear tales of tragically poor performance,
and the inability to cope with modern programming. Think of it as a equivalent
to C# 1.0, ie old fashioned.

I don't know how much it is seen as protecting IP, but it is not clear how GS
can give it up within the next decade even if they tried. There is just so
much of it there.

There are spots of Java, VBA, and C++ in GS, who often value C++ experience in
new hires, even if they don't use it.

The GS IT bonus pool is better than most people's IT bonus pool, but it's
several tiers down. Mobility is no worse at GS than many other firms, but that
is not saying much of course. Slang does in this context work to your
advantage. Many IT department technologies have no value in quant and/or front
office roles, but since Slang is prevalent in all aspects of GS, this barrier
is much smaller. But of course the politics in all banks is far more of a
problem than the technology."

Dominic is a very well known Quant head hunter. Well informed and generally
well liked within the community. I'd wager that they don't want to use Slang
in the spinoff simply because they have a change to do a reset and don't want
the baggage.

~~~
ig1
When I was interviewing at GS we talked about Python vs Slang and several of
the interviewers mentioned the biggest problem with slang was the lack of
toolkit (good debuggers, IDE, etc.).

~~~
dmillar
It's also worth noting that the SEC thinks python is a good language for
specing ABS.

[http://kelloggfinance.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/the-sec-
gets-...](http://kelloggfinance.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/the-sec-gets-one-
right/)

~~~
moonhorse
I remember I see people using some sort of old fashioned Basic like IDE with
blue screen and yellow fonts to work on it. Do not know if it has improved.

------
logicalmind
I read this article a while back, that said that Microsoft employs more
millionaire secretary's that any other company in the world. They took stock
options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this
picture, of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrari. Blew my mind. you
see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think its possible,
even easy. And then you turn on the TV, and there's just more of it. The $87
Million lottery winner, that kid actor that just made 20 million o his last
movie, that internet stock that shot through the roof, you could have made
millions if you had just gotten in early, and that's exactly what I wanted to
do: get in. I didn't want to be an innovator any more, i just wanted to make
the quick and easy buck, i just wanted in. The Notorious BIG said it best:
"Either you're slangin' crack-rock, or you've got a wicked jump-shot." Nobody
wants to work for it anymore. There's no honor in taking that after school job
at Mickey Dee's, honor's in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of
slanging crack-rock: I became a stock broker.

\- Seth Davis, Boiler Room

~~~
endtime
How is this at all relevant to GS porting their code to a standard programming
language?

~~~
logicalmind
I meant it as a tongue-in-cheek reference. The mentality of the character in
the movie boiler room gets involved with stock trading because he equates it
to the young white male version of "slangin' crack rocks". I found it
interesting that stock traders/programmers are literally "slang-in'".

The mentality in the movie also leads one to question the value of what is
being created in the world of stock trading. So, to me, the comment had
multiple levels of irony and coincidence. But having to explain it makes it
lose some of the luster.

------
jrockway
_At initial stages, potential recruits are not even told that Goldman is the
client._

Well, yeah. That's because if the recruiter tells you where the job is, you'll
go directly to the client and keep the 30% of your salary that the recruiter
gets to yourself.

~~~
jbooth
Of course, at places like Goldman (in stark contrast to the Cloudera blog post
the other week), coming in through a recruiter actually increases your chance
of getting the job and a high salary. The recruiter can be the door-banger who
pushes your paperwork through the organization and demands a high salary,
while you get to be mild-mannered, not desperate for employment, and not a
prima donna about money.

~~~
azim
I assume the recruiter will take a percentage of the salary as their fee, so
it's in their interest to do this.

~~~
sfall
most recruiters work for the company and the company pays the fee, sometimes a
flat fee or a % of the yearly salary of the new employee

------
retube
Slang is a proprietory language developed by GS, it's been around for ~15
years I think. If I remember correctly they have a development/analysis
environment called SecDB in which all coding is done with Slang. All their
modelling, pricing and risking is done in SecDB across all asset classes so
it's pretty widely embedded.

~~~
silverlake
I've looked at Slang a bit. It's an interpreted dataflow language running on
an in-memory database called SecDB. Untyped, Pascal-ish, single-threaded, and
poor support for namespaces. Like a spreadsheet, it only needs to recompute
the subgraph that has changed. It was probably innovative 25 years ago (I
think it came out mid-80s), but today you could write Java code and use
memoization aggressively to speed things up. Slang is not why GS traders are
successful. AFAIK, GS succeeds because they listen to their risk people.

~~~
pasbesoin
A former GS pricing quant describes Slang briefly in a footnote at the
following URL. It doesn't go into much detail, but maybe adds a morsel to
what's been mentioned:

[http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-
with-z...](http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-with-zero-
revenue-is-better-than-working-for-goldman-sachs#footnote_4_195)

------
js2
"That language plays a vital role in Goldman's prop trading, including it's
computer driven high-frequency trading."

John Carney, Senior Editor, CNBC.com, needs to get himself an editor. :-)

------
stuntprogrammer
There's a long history of using alternative in-house languages at Wall St.
firms (and new ones are being developed at a few large firms I know).

~~~
gaius
Morgan Stanley and others were big users of APL, back in the day. Now _that's_
a wacky language!

~~~
stuntprogrammer
APL isn't all that weird once you spend a little time with it. It's "just" a
dynamically typed collection-oriented language. I think people look at some
screenshots, make a stupid joke since they aren't familiar with the notation,
and move on rather than digging in. I highly recommend Dyalog's dialect for a
comfortable IDE, OO support, .NET support for GUIs on Windows etc.

For MS' APL dialect, you can get the whole thing from:
<http://www.aplusdev.org/>

My understanding is that they still have many many lines of code written in
this language running. They also use a commercial intellectual successor of
this language called q from kx systems. Many other firms do as well, but I
won't name them since I don't know which ones are public about it.

I'm pretty sure that the firms I know creating new languages are not public
about it, but there are at least 3 very very large ones doing so. Aiming for a
functional flavor, large-scale parallelism, streaming, low-latency processing
of large data sets, high-quality compilation and leveraging new hardware are
common themes.

~~~
gaius
Yep, I used to work with a bloke from IP Sharp
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._P._Sharp_Associates#APL_Impl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._P._Sharp_Associates#APL_Implementors)),
he showed me some cool stuff. I have another friend who does q and kdb+ stuff.

~~~
scotth
I currently work with a bunch of Sharpies, including Dave Markwick (mentioned
in that article). Dave still writes APL from time to time.

------
atomical
The "Why" is missing in this article. Anyone care to comment?

~~~
RexRollman
What I would like to know is why didn't they simply license it to them?

~~~
gnuvince
Most likely because they cannot afford to risk that someone will steal the
intellectual property of their slow and bug-ridden language implementation.

~~~
hga
Well, there's one big advantage to the whole Slang _system_ and that is that
it's integrated throughout the company and the system can be used for
relatively quick "what if?" and "where do we stand?" queries. Instead of the
data being embedded in a zillion (often incorrect) spreadsheets and small
databases or whatever that have to be manually scraped, reported and
consolidated, it all happens automatically. It may not be "fast" but it's a
lot faster than manual methods.

ADDED: see this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581604>

~~~
ivenkys
From what i know that was the original intention behind Slang and SecDB.
Standardization of use across different departments and in some ways a way to
subvert the politics.

------
nathanwdavis
It will be interesting to find out what the 'more standard' language that they
decide on will be. With the resurgence of new Lisp-like languages, F# (which
is already in wide use at Credit Suisse), and other functional types getting a
little more mainstream, I wonder if something like that will be chosen over
Java, C++ or C#.

------
hakl
I thought Slang was a static subset Smalltalk used to implement virtual
machines, like PreScheme (Scheme48) and Restricted Python (PyPy).

~~~
limmeau
Also, the JED editor has an extension language of that name. It was my editor
of choice during the late 90s, and I also used Slang as a scripting language
in my youthful attempts at adventure games.

<http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/>

------
c1sc0
"Snake" in Dutch ... how appropriate.

~~~
unwind
"Hose" in Swedish, which I also found amusing. :)

Also, S-lang is the name of at least one well-known programming language, it's
used to script the jed editor among other things. See
<http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/>.

~~~
fmw
In Dutch, "hose" is another meaning of slang as well.

------
clistctrl
Unrelated to the story (looking at the stock price) Why would GS be worth $154
a share when they're paying dividends of $.35 a share?

Of course I guess the last time Apple paid a dividend was 1995, and they're
trading at $259 a share.

~~~
jakarta
When you buy a share you are buying a piece of a business and the future cash
flows that it generates.

Looking at a figure like dividends is kind of meaningless. You specifically
want to look at the cash flow that is available to owners. That cash flow can
be used for different things (buybacks, reinvesting in the business,
dividends, etc).

------
jabbslad
"The problem is that Goldman's traders use a special computer language called
"Slang" that was developed for internal use only."

^^^ What in God's name are traders doing going anywhere near a programming
language? Surely this is some mistake.

~~~
waterside81
Believe it or not, this is quite common in the industry. I developed some
software for one of the Big 5 banks in Canada and I saw first hand traders
learning to program using C++, Java, whatever they can get their hands on
because they need to test out models, perform calculations that Excel can't do
readily - although VBA is a trader's best friend.

Recently, they've been using R more and more. And as you'd imagine, their code
is _horrendous_ but hey, it works.

What I learned is that the entire financial industry relies on Excel and
really bad programming. It's really scary to think that 37Signals has better
software and software practices than a bank.

~~~
stuntprogrammer
Historically there has been some truly awful code, no doubt, and much still
being written.

There is a growing breed of trader though who can code well. Coding well in a
variety of languages is becoming a basic skill along with advanced math &
stats for certain types of trading jobs.

