Caml Trading - Experiences with OCaml on Wall Street
Caml Trading - Experiences with OCaml on Wall Street
Location:
Legends Ballroom Robinson / Whitman
Time:
Friday, 1:45pm - 2:35pm
Abstract:
Jane Street is a company that has staked its existence on functional programming. Specifically, we run a large and successful trading business on software written almost entirely in OCaml, a statically typed functional programming language.
Relying on what is, frankly, an obscure corner of the programming language world is an unusual choice that demands some explanation. In this talk, I'll discuss how and why we made that choice, and how we think it worked out. Along the way, I'll explore the demands that trading makes on your technology stack, and explain why we believe that statically typed functional programming in general, and OCaml in particular, are well suited to those demands.
Yaron Minsky heads the Technology group at Jane Street, a proprietary
trading firm that is the largest industrial user of OCaml. He was
responsible for introducing OCaml to the company and for managing the
company's transition to using OCaml for all of its core
infrastructure. Today, billions of dollars worth of securities
transactions flow each day through those systems. Yaron obtained his
PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he studied
distributed systems. Yaron has lectured, blogged and written about
OCaml for years, with articles published in Communications of the ACM
and the Journal of Functional Programming. He chairs the steering
committee of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming, and is a
member of the steering committee for the International Conference on
Functional Programming.
@yminsky