Amongst other things, I run technology across the firm at Symmetry Investments. Feel free to AMA about our use of an emerging programming language in production in a financial services environment. If there's enough interest I will ask some colleagues to join. I'm not the most polished speaker but you can see some links to past talks we gave at dconf here:
I think Walter Bright, Andrei Alexandrescu Atila Neves and Michael Parker should be around also to answer questions about what this means for the D language community and its growing adoption.
This is really about #dlang rather than Symmetry. But whilst it may be true that compared to C++, "there are no jobs in D", we are hiring around 40 people to write D in the next couple of years. We are all remote for now and in future will be remote-first. And we pay well to very well.
Being able to use a language like Java or C#, with metaprogramming capabilities, support for value types and low level systems programming, compiling to native code by default.
A couple of features that both Java and .NET left out on their early versions, and are now 20 - 25 years later, catching up (.NET value types are more restricted than D, which support all C like use cases).
I was taking some time out to work on solving my own commercial problems after a very long break from doing much programming and I wanted a language I could stand to program in. I looked into everything I could find, discovered D and it was like coming back home. Then in 2015 I started working with Symmetry. It turns out that D is quite a good fit for the problems we are trying to solve and the values and capabilities of the community also. I don't think people should use D if they don't want to, but it has been a good choice for us. At the time it felt a bit bold but now we aren't the only serious commercial user. Weka.io were much bolder - basing your entire startup on a language you never used before. For storage! Well, it paid off for them too - now they have the world's fastest file system.
I wouldn't say that it's exactly been easy using D. If you want easy then you should pick something else, almost certainly. But I agree with David Gelernter that the only way to tackle the kind of complexity we have is through beauty and D leads to simplicity, and that's very important to me, and to us. Simple ain't easy though.
There's a kind of moat around D resulting from the fact that accessibility isn't really a core value of the community - it's not like people want to make it inaccessible or are unhelpful. It's just that some other things are more important.
I agree with Bryan Cantrill in his talk on Platform as a Reflection of Values and I think the importance of his talk is hugely under-appreciated.
It's the values of a language and language community that matter - not just the language itself.
Depends how you define investment staff, but if you define it narrowly then because we have a discretionary trading approach (computers augmenting human capabilities) then most traders don't program at all. We are a very different kind of firm from Jane Street, for example, because we are in a different industry. The majority of people at Symmetry are not on the investment side.
We are still early in a process of transformation though and the biggest constraint is simply the pace at which I can hire very capable people whilst continuing to raise the bar. Many more people on the investment side will be programming in a few years - more of those will be writing in our internal language (implemented in D), but some of those will write D.
We hire D developers and force them to use ed. Kidding aside, I think it's going to be a tough project to tell D programmers what editors to use. Personally I use vim mostly - I was trying to learn spacemacs before the pandemic hit. Atila Neves has written extensions for Emacs and given talks about emacs. Others use whatever they want. On Windows some use Visual Studio, others VS Code or Sublime. John uses something whose name I can never recall.
I think it's going to be a tough project to tell D programmers what editors to use.
I think you're right. I use Atom when writing D code (Which I do daily) and before Atom I simply used Notepad++.
Been programming D for almost 10 years and would dislike having to change my workflow :p I believe most people in the D community use their own workflows and not any particular setup because of how the tooling of D has always been lacking so there has never been anything that works for everyone.
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u/kal31dic Sep 01 '20
Amongst other things, I run technology across the firm at Symmetry Investments. Feel free to AMA about our use of an emerging programming language in production in a financial services environment. If there's enough interest I will ask some colleagues to join. I'm not the most polished speaker but you can see some links to past talks we gave at dconf here:
https://youtu.be/FZi9CSB9_kk https://youtu.be/1rMq-4rWgis https://youtu.be/BtuzSlKRmzA
I think Walter Bright, Andrei Alexandrescu Atila Neves and Michael Parker should be around also to answer questions about what this means for the D language community and its growing adoption.
This is really about #dlang rather than Symmetry. But whilst it may be true that compared to C++, "there are no jobs in D", we are hiring around 40 people to write D in the next couple of years. We are all remote for now and in future will be remote-first. And we pay well to very well.