Yaron Minsky

Co-Author "Real World OCaml"

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

Caml Trading - Experiences with OCaml on Wall Street
Track: Real World Functional Programming

Location:
Legends Ballroom Robinson / Whitman

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.