Best Programming languages

[MiloRambaldi]

Who is suggesting writing a serious, production level random number generator in Python? Get off your high-horse, read and understand the thread properly. It is trivially easy to link python with C/C++/Fortran code, which is what any sane person would do if they wanted a 'serious' random number generator.

Or, an even more sane person would just use the built in python random number generator, which is written in C: http://docs.python.org/3/library/random.html or yet another library implementation.

You evidently don't know much about random number generation. I looked at the Python RNG library you referenced. It is a dinky (i.e. basic) generator, that is absolutely not suitable for many financial applications. The reasons for this have been discussed at length on Wilmott. This is coming from someone who has considerably extended some of the functionality of the boost::random library, which in turn is far more "serious" than python's.

 

[Barny]

You evidently don't know much about random number generation. I looked at the Python RNG library you referenced. It is a dinky (i.e. basic) generator, that is absolutely not suitable for many financial applications. The reasons for this have been discussed at length on Wilmott. This is coming from someone who has considerably extended some of the functionality of the boost::random library, which in turn is far more "serious" than python's.

What is your point? I have already said that it is straightforward to link python with C++/C/Fortran. You don't have to adopt C++ as your implementation language just for its random number generators.

 

[Daniel Duffy]

Fortran is not popular in finance. It is more popular in universities.

Fortran has come a long way from Fortran IV and punch cards (which I liked but it was ages ago...) but I get the feeling that potential employers like to see C++ on CV/résumé.

 

[Daniel Duffy]

There was a general consensus until recently that Smalltalk was the best OOP language to learn. I would tend to agree with this statement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

The single most important reason to learn Smalltalk today is that extreme programming and scrum both got invented in the Smalltalk community... and the highly interactive style of programming you experience in Smalltalk is simpler, more powerful and direct than anything you can do with Java or C# or Ruby... and you can't really understand how well agile methods can work until you've tried to do extreme programming in Smalltalk. Few other languages (no mainstream ones anyway) have a comparable feature set.