
The rise of functional programming in Banks - piokuc
http://blog.oxfordknight.com/?p=269
======
muhit2002
Guys,

Not sure how it got picked up, but i don't think it's a creppy stalking of my
profile...in fact i am flattered. Thank you for your feedback.

Couple of things that I think is worth adding here:

1\. This article was the first article i ever wrote for Oxford Knight 2 years
ago. The date refresh on our website is wrong. My intention was to give
something back to the community I serve, and also learn from feedback. Some of
it does look like I am stating the obvious, but at the time it wasn’t obvious
to everyone. Furthermore, recruitment isn’t designed to be open-source. It’s
all about protecting IP at the lowest level, so to open up even a little bit
is a big step for us/recruiters….i hope some of you guys can appreciate that .

2\. The article was written looking at how I used to recruit in 2006. Shallow,
buzz word chasing, educational profile chasing etc. I like to think I’ve
evolved a bit since 2006, but do understand I still have a lot to learn an
certainly won’t let my non-technical background get in the way.

3\. If you guys are interested in seeing some of my more recent stuff I’ve
written, it maybe worth jumping on to my quora profile where I write more
actively about the technology trends in london….Quora (Abdul-Muhit).

4\. Finally, I do feel the pain of how recruitment operates now. Changing a £4
billion industry is not easy, and no technical innovation is going to make a
sector of that size disappear anytime soon. I founded Oxford Knight with the
view of creating a legacy not a transaction service business. For a boy that
was raised by a single mother on benefits I have all the little things I need
now! For me it’s all about creating a legacy….something built to last.
Therefore, if we have upset anyone of you guys with below par service then
please do feel free to email directly, and I promise I will do my upmost to
fix it.

Best, Abdul co-founder of Oxford Knight

------
brohee
"Finally, whilst I have never coded, because Clojure/Scala is on the JVM it’s
very easy to pick up for a good Java developer."

I guess it's another recruiter wondering why he gets no respect from the
cattle he handles...

~~~
gone35
_Oxford Knight is a technical recruitment agency. None of our consultants have
written a line of code... yet._

So it seems to be a company-wide feature. It's hard to see though how
technically semi-literate technical recruiters can be a good thing at all.
Perhaps this explains in part this other telling quote from the article:

 _I recall the candidate in question being perfect in every aspect (CompSci
from top university, sound understanding of data structures, algorithms,
complexity... coupled with actual practical programming experience, and oh
yeah – decent knowledge of Exotic Risk and Pricing)._

Note the order of qualifications, suggesting that having top marks from Oxford
is just as relevant/important as knowing how to crank through data
structures/algorithms questions; with having actual programming or
domain/relevant experience as just a nice plus.

Very telling of their mindset, but also understandable if they are not
qualified enough to assess the technical competence of candidates on technical
terms alone.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I got the impression that this was someone just out of college. "Knowing how
to crank through data structures/algorithms questions" probably means knowing
how to talk about them in an interview, _not_ lots of real-world experience.
If that's the case, top marks from Oxford may in fact be the most relevant
fact about the candidate.

~~~
mathattack
I agree - it sounded very much like someone trying to be "out there writing"
rather than a real expert. It was just written like an amateur. That said, who
am I to pick on someone trying to improve their online presence?

------
yawz
Who would design such a Web site (I'm trying to read it with Chrome so I'm not
sure if it's a rendering issue specific to Chrome). What could be the purpose
of squishing the content in the middle of a useless left column and gigantic,
always-visible feedback form?

~~~
jackalope
The space bar also can't be used to advance the content (in the three browsers
I tried). I've been seeing this a lot lately in blogs and it's quite
frustrating!

~~~
hyperpape
It can, once you add focus to that little content pane (and you have to do the
same for the mouse wheel). Still baffling design, but slightly less broken.

------
dons
The Haskell logo is backwards...

------
fredley
Is this the latest tactic of aggressive technical recruiters?

Interesting though this article is, forgive me for calling out Oxford Knight
here. For those not in the know they are just a recruitment company. One of
those that are a constant hassle on LinkedIn. It seems telling them multiple
times that I am not interested in a job in finance does not stem the flow of
"Forgive me, you must get this all the time, but..." connection requests and
InMails, or creepy profile views.

~~~
romanovcode
> connection requests and InMails, or creepy profile views.

Isn't LinkedIn suppose to be precisely for this? Also - creepy profile views?
Wat.

~~~
iopq
You can just like feel that they're looking at your profile and salivating
over your qualifications. Gross!

------
scrumper
"One major American bank is pushing a JVM based language that supports
functional programming (Scala) as a firm-wide technology. Another two major
banks are using Clojure for both real-time risk and pricing, and risk
reporting."

Any ideas which banks?

~~~
jamesdutc
"He then gives examples of companies like Morgan Stanley in London adopting
Scala heavily. This type of adoption could be a great asset for Scala's
adoption or it can be a touchstone of regret that people point to when
deciding to use Scala. He fears that Morgan Stanley might have a hard time
finding the right Scala developers for their projects, and Scala skills are
rare. If, for example, unguided recruiters recruit nascent Scala developers,
Scala projects' success could become difficult."

[http://www.infoq.com/articles/barriers-to-scala-
adoption](http://www.infoq.com/articles/barriers-to-scala-adoption)

~~~
scrumper
Good find, thanks. You've quoted a good part, too - it's something Scala is
particularly prone to given how many ways there are of using it.

One thing I've seen is a cautious adoption of Akka in distributed systems in
capital markets (grid services for analysis computations being one example).
First-class Scala support in Akka is encouraging those banks to take a look
for specific projects.

------
rurban
He missed Erlang, heavily used at Wall Street.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
I'd believe the headline "The fall of COBOL programming in Banks" but this one
just makes me laugh.

------
lispm
> Easier to write concurrent programs

Yeah, sure.

~~~
gaius
The funny thing is, they were worried about concurrent programming in the 80s
too
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer)

Guess what, there was no real crisis then either...

~~~
muhit2002
But hasn't CPU speed peaked? Moors law? Meaning that future performance is
going to come from concurrency?

Abdul Muhit

~~~
gaius
They thought that in the 80s too! Read the page...

There is nothing new in computing, every 10 years the same things come round
again and again. That's why old geezers like me become cynics.

~~~
muhit2002
Whilst they may have thought of concurrency problems in the 80s as you
outline, the problem of concurrency (and subsequently performance) appears to
be a bit more genuine now. Processing power has peaked...fact. Now with most
PC's being shipped with multi-processors the need for concurrent software is a
real one.

I do appreciate that there is an enormous list of things that are important
right now, that software engineers have to worry about such as good user
experience, proper abstraction, security, encryption, privacy, reusability,
reliable data storage, good recovery etc etc

However to dismiss concurrency issues in a world with peaked processing powers
on a single CPU as something of a fashion-fad! Doesn’t sound to me as in synch
with what i've been observing.

Would be nice to hear from others on this1

~~~
gaius
Ask yourself this: why is removing the GIL a very low priority for the Python
community? Or why has the GIL not slowed the adoption of Python, esp. in
financial services?

~~~
muhit2002
A. Because it’s not easy to remove GIL according to Guido van van Rossumn.
It’s an issue and the fact the python community are talking about it means
concurrency is an issue.

B. Your last comment points to one language and the complexity of adapting it
vs ignoring wider argument that there is a greater need for concurrency to add
performance than what there was in the 80’s when CPU’s got faster ever year.

c. You almost indicate that despite the GIL banks are using python and
therefore must be less concerned with concurrency. This is not the case
because GIL in no way stops concurrent programming from happening in a single
Python process. The only constraint the GIL places on multi-threaded
applications is that a single Python process cannot execute multiple threads
_simultaneously_. You can still run multiple threads.

~~~
gaius
a) it's a nice to have, but the lack of it hadn't hurt the adoption rate of
Python. So that's not it.

b) computers nowadays are insanely fast - so fast that we use high level
languages like Python instead of assembly. So that's not it.

c) that makes no sense. There is no point in threading without concurrency! So
that's not it either.

There is no multi core crisis now, just as there was no transputer crisis back
then. Only people trying to sell stuff.

------
NathanKP
I'm flagging this as recruiter spam.

~~~
boothead
I don't think it's spam. Insight into tends in technology adoption are pretty
interesting to me. Shouldn't we also encourage recruiters that give any kind
of a shit about the tech they recruit for? If there was more of that around
maybe I'd get less of the monkey "I see you haz teh skillz" type spam I get in
my inbox all the time!

~~~
gaius
Of course it's spam - normal people wouldn't capitalise Banks like that. Also
no one says high freq when they mean HFT. And most HFT shops aren't really
hedge funds, they're prop traders...

