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Comment by zitterbewegung

2 days ago

Yea and this created "bank python" informally a good article is here.

https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html

The best description about how it became a problem is one of the paragraphs.

"New starters take an exceptionally long time to get up to speed - and that's if they don't resign in fit of pique as soon as they see the special, mandatory, in-house IDE (as I nearly did). Even months in, new starters are still learning quite fundamental new things: there is a lot that is different."

I think it took me til I was there around two and a half years to fully comprehend it when I was working on it. Not much modern training til they figured out they had to teach it again that was better. The worst part is to make an UI around it coding it and it wasn't approved for new projects.

That article was fascinating, thanks for sharing it. I wonder if all banks use the same "bank Python" or if they all forked it in different ways?

  • Some of the same people bounced around implementing it in different places, but they started from scratch each time.

    Some things to search for:

    JP Morgan Athena BofA Quartz Kirat Singh Mark Higgins

Wow thanks for the link. My first reaction was "that's the jankiest thing I've ever heard of" but on reflection the author is correct about it being a fairly optimally fit predator. When the benchmark is .xlsx files on a shared drive things are bound to get pretty weird.

  • The problem was that people who know python don't really expect this specific DSL and it is easier for someone that doesn't know python and just learn their DSL and then read the rest of python.