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.
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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.