Comment by elemeno
21 hours ago
To the best of my knowledge much of this originated with SecDB/Slang at Goldman - SecDB (securities db I believe) being the object store and slang the somewhat quirky C like language that ran with it (also the only language I’ve used professionally that let you have spaces in the variable names).
Some of the folk that built that (or worked on it) ended up at JPM and Merrill where they built the Python centric version - Alpha and Quartz respectively. Barclays Capital has/had a similar system as well I think, but it’s not one I know about offhand - they did though, memorably, have a system that was pretty much Haskell-in-Excel.
JPM's version was Athena (not Alpha) [0]
[0] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/managing-python-at-scal...
Ha when I read “I won’t name the system; let’s just call it Minerva,” I thought, “I’ll bet it’s called Athena irl. “
Aaah. I get it now. Athena -> Minerva.
A lot of them retired too and enjoyed making bank producing a pile of hot mess that the rest of the higher ups did not fully appreciate the mess they were producing. Collected their multi million packages and left
I worked on Quartz at BAML for 4 years, it was great. I met Kirat Singh once when he visited the UK, he took the basic concept from Goldman to JPM, then to BAML.
I was lucky enough to start my career sat on the next desk across from Kirat. Genius programmer and nice guy! He later went on to found Beacon platform which was the same again, as a cloud hosted service.
Yeah, and Beacon was acquired a year ago. The acquiring company in turn went private. Yesterday.
Genius coder, yes. Nice guy, most definitely yes.