Actually Haskell is used in a surprising number of trading groups. However most people involved are contractually obligated to never talk about the technology in use at their firm. We make no secret that we use Haskell as our primary language in building trading systems. Other functional languages, notably F#, have seen significant uptake as well.
As to whether Haskell should/must/could be used an a particular system much of this choice (non-technology influences aside) is going to be bound by speed. As Knight is a market maker I would expect that the stock choice for rapidly evolving software is c++ on the intel compiler with a significant amount of strategies running on ASIC and FPGA. The reason being is that many strategies are relying on latency as a primary input to their success.
We have the advantage of not being latency bound and we place a great amount of emphasis on correctness. We accept the fact that if we want to run latency bound strategies most of our runtime stack would be useless. If they had been using Haskell would they have still had whatever problem it was? At this point completely unknown. However the real world is a messy place and sometimes even haskell code has bugs.
Steve
On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 3:06 AM, Ketil Malde
<ketil@malde.org> wrote:
"Vasili I. Galchin" <
vigalchin@gmail.com> writes:
> I am going to make an assumption .... except for Jane Street
> Capital all/most "Wall Street" software is written in an imperative
> language.
programmers.
> Assuming this why is Wall Street not awaken to the dangers.
As an explanation, this is a bit simplistic, I think. But I think the
reason these companies are willing to use experimental technology (as
Haskell is considered to be in industry), is that the consequences of
error can be so high. For most mainstream software, users have been
trained to accept unreliability, and/or are not willing to pay the
costs.
Other examples of expensive software faults is the Ariane 5 launch and
the Sleipner A oil rig (that collapsed and sunk when in tow due to a mistake
in FEA strength calculations).
The space (and defense) industry have a long history of working towards
software security, but I think they have focused more on the software
process than on technology - ADA notwithstanding. And probably rightly
so, even though technology can help you write correct code, there is
still plenty of rope.
-k
--
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants