[BangPypers] Wall street may embrace Python

[Sirtaj Singh Kang]

On 26-Apr-10, at 3:46 PM, Dhananjay Nene wrote:
[snip]
>
> I think a DSL based contract (or more precisely waterfall  
> specification) may
> be more concise and self descriptive. But that would require a  
> definition of
> a new language grammar.  However reasoning about the contracts is  
> not in the
> scope of the SEC specification. The scope is (in my understanding) a  
> clear
> communication of the how the waterfall implications are worked out  
> (eg. how
> much does each stakeholder get paid and what are the conditions  
> under which
> that gets decided) and at least in terms of standard programming  
> languages
> Python does pretty well.

Well the question I'm asking is, what are the implicit qualifications  
of the humans who are going to interpret these specifications? I see  
two profiles:

1) Financial, actuarial and legal experts with some programming  
experience.
2) Programming experts with financial, actuarial and legal experience.

While there are people who fit both these profiles, there is a reason  
they get paid high-six figure USD salaries. Python alone is fine, but  
consider bog-standard recurring financial patterns like compound  
interest and graduated tax brackets. These imply functions that will  
occur often in these specifications, further implying (de- 
facto-)standard libraries containing highly domain-specific financial  
routines will be written. These are already embedded proto-DSLs! So  
you're not side-stepping DSLs by using python, only hiding them in  
plain sight. But you are not necessarily gaining the benefits of using  
an independent, well-specified declarative grammar the primary one  
being that you are possibly burdening non-programmers with general  
purpose programming constructs that are not their primary focus. There  
is a reason so many finance guys use R and (gah!) Excel to do their  
financial modelling - they are not interested in programming.

Anyhow I'll stop here, I understand that the SEC requires only a  
subset of what I'm talking about, but the scope for these kinds of  
agreements goes well past the SEC and is something worth studying and  
implementing in its own right for fun and profit.

-Taj.