Programming Languages

Spending the weekend over at my sister's place I got a very interesting question - Hey can you teach me C++ since I need to do some programming for some of my financial derivative work - Now I particularly don't like C++ for the sheer number of concepts and sheer number of options to do the same thing in a C like dialect. Personally as a programmer I prefer the simplicity of C and on occasion have had to use shell , sed, awk to get most of my work done. Thanks to my own love of languages and never shirking from writing custom parsers and custom languages for some of my own projects either they be during my time at the university or during the course of my professional career I figured there had to be a better way than getting her senses damaged by the whole thing with segmentation faults, runtime errors, dynamic casting errors . Much easier with an interpreted language.

So I did some googleing to figure out what kind of libraries she needed and for what . I discovered that open source did have some kind of financial libraries and something available for the kind of stuff that she needed and that it had interfaces in languages simpler than C++.

The pain with programming in C / C++ for non-programmers is the steep learning curve with the whole jargon of CS, memory management - the absolute pain of looking up APIs and trying to make sense of doco that makes sense to other computer science programmers but not to programmers who want to do a bit to get their basic tasks done. Exposing APIs in simpler languages like python, ruby etc tries to improve the footprint of users and allows the users to solve the problems they want to rather than worry about other problems not specific to the problem domain. Also playing with an interpreted language rather than a translation system allows for interactivity and quick testing of functions along with development and reduces the pain of setup and attempting to do things differently.

So I am trying to now set up python so that she can get going with simple programming and free her mind off issues related to low level details. The library I am trying to use is quantlib
and see if we can get the relevant exposure in the corresponding languages. I wonder though if there could be a way of generating stuff or link this up with Excel or openoffice so that she can remain with her favourite tool. Interesting stuff for a weekend eh ...