[PRL] The Importance of Excel

Matthias Felleisen matthias at ccs.neu.edu
Thu Feb 14 12:33:40 EST 2013


From HtDP/2e, since ~2003 on my web page: 

Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are Dummies.

Good programming requires thought, but everyone can do it and everyone can experience the satisfaction that comes with it. The price is worth paying for the sheer joy of the discovery process, the elegance of the result, and the commercial benefits of a systematic program design process.

;; --- 

They already had a mathematician type in a mathematical model of these trades. I am almost certain that the the mathematical model is a system of equations with some funny vector symbol over it somewhere. If it "turned itself" into executable code, you'd have a program from the model and in all likelihood, it would have eliminated some of the glaring logical transition errors. 

That's precisely what JaneSt noticed, which is why spread sheets are banned and OCaml is welcome. 







On Feb 14, 2013, at 12:13 PM, Mitchell Wand wrote:

> Indeed. I was going to shoutout to the CodeAcademy folks as the foremost proponents of the "everyone should code"  movement.
> 
> Of course, it is unrealistic to expect everyone to learn to write _good_ code.  But maybe, even if they write enough cr*p code, they will learn to recognize some of the pitfalls.  "Why am I entering all this stuff by hand?  There must be a better way.  Let me walk down the hall and ask somebody"
> 
> Oh wait, this is the real world.   Got carried away there for a minute.
> 
> --Mitch
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Matthias Felleisen
> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On Feb 14, 2013, at 11:26 AM, John Clements wrote:
> >
> >> requires time and development resources that people don't choose to allocate to the problems.
> >
> >
> > Saving $500K on a high-quality programmer to turn this financial model into a properly designed program is far cheaper than losing $1B later on. Or as Realm of Racket puts it, a week of "programming" can easily save you an hour of thought.
> 
> I think there are two reasons that this doesn't happen.  One is that
> the advantage is not always this clear-cut -- most spreadsheets don't
> lose $1B.  But more importantly, having a programmer in the loop
> implies communication between the analyst/trader and the programmer,
> and what Excel allows is for the trader to do the programming
> themselves.  Even if the bank had many great programmers, there would
> still be such spreadsheets created merely to avoid that overhead,
> unless it gets thoroughly banned by the company (which is maybe what
> happens at Jane Street, but I bet they use Excel too).
> 
> The solution is not hiring high-quality programmers, but thinking of
> programming as a fundamental skill that everyone who works with
> numbers needs.
> 
> Sam
> 
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