This is all fascinating stuff, I've learned a lot. If this is the outcome of recruiters posting on the list, I'm all for it!<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 11:02 PM, Andy Robinson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:andy@reportlab.com">andy@reportlab.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">> Report Lab does a fair bit of work in the financial sector in a rather different field.<br>
</div>Sorry, the light took a while to reach the batcave tonight...<br>
<br>
I was pushing Python in finance back in 1997/8, and there have been<br>
many, many people using it (usually under the radar at first) in the<br>
City for a long time. In the old days it excelled at gluing systems<br>
together, scripting other peoples' C code, and prototyping algorithms.<br>
There were many times when people needed a solution faster than "IT"<br>
could organise it, and being freely available and able to work with<br>
Excel, it helped a lot of quants.<br>
<br>
Now, of course, Python is mainstream, and other languages have got a<br>
lot better at the 'glue' and web stuff and caught up to some degree.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
<br>
On 15 December 2010 14:02, Jonathan Hartley <<a href="mailto:tartley@tartley.com">tartley@tartley.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> On the other hand, if you're running across the<br>
> internet, then any slowdown due to using Python verses another language<br>
> would be vastly swamped by network and other IO delays. Am I very much<br>
> mistaken?<br>
<br>
</div>There are no general answers to that question. There are indeed many<br>
cases where people needlessly worry about the language when network<br>
and IO dominate. There are also lots of cases where you want to do<br>
some kind of "atomic job" on one machine, and find it's an order of<br>
magnitude too slow in a high level language. There are some "Monte<br>
Carlo" approaches to pricing securities which have no analytic<br>
solution; and in the retail sector it's fashionable now to show<br>
'clouds of outcomes' about where your pension might end up, needing<br>
10000 random walks to plot a chart and spit out a 2-3 page PDF<br>
including it.<br>
<br>
Two of the beauties of Python in this area are that (a) you can afford<br>
to rewrite your algorithm several times and be sure it's the best<br>
approach, and (b) if you really need to, it's easy to shift the 'inner<br>
loops' into C.<br>
<br>
Putting it in perspective, I even know some people in the City who<br>
find hand-coded C too slow for their simulations, and who are<br>
basically writing microcode for chips in order to put a supercomputer<br>
under their desk!<br>
<br>
The bigger question is whether all this horsepower ultimately leads to<br>
better investment performance. I will stay out of that one ;-)<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
<br>
--<br>
Andy Robinson<br>
ReportLab<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5">_______________________________________________<br>
python-uk mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:python-uk@python.org">python-uk@python.org</a><br>
<a href="http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-uk" target="_blank">http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-uk</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>