In particular, this quote from Dominic Connor is telling:
"...[snip]... As Zmei says [SLang] a GS only language, which even within GS is not exactly universally loved. I hear tales of tragically poor performance, and the inability to cope with modern programming. Think of it as a equivalent to C# 1.0, ie old fashioned.
I don't know how much it is seen as protecting IP, but it is not clear how GS can give it up within the next decade even if they tried. There is just so much of it there.
There are spots of Java, VBA, and C++ in GS, who often value C++ experience in new hires, even if they don't use it.
The GS IT bonus pool is better than most people's IT bonus pool, but it's several tiers down.
Mobility is no worse at GS than many other firms, but that is not saying much of course.
Slang does in this context work to your advantage. Many IT department technologies have no value in quant and/or front office roles, but since Slang is prevalent in all aspects of GS, this barrier is much smaller.
But of course the politics in all banks is far more of a problem than the technology."
Dominic is a very well known Quant head hunter. Well informed and generally well liked within the community. I'd wager that they don't want to use Slang in the spinoff simply because they have a change to do a reset and don't want the baggage.
When I was interviewing at GS we talked about Python vs Slang and several of the interviewers mentioned the biggest problem with slang was the lack of toolkit (good debuggers, IDE, etc.).
I remember I see people using some sort of old fashioned Basic like IDE with blue screen and yellow fonts to work on it. Do not know if it has improved.
Is it really such a terrible example? It was basically Java, but then dumbed down a bit, as I recall.
C# later evolved into a competitive, modern language, but that first release was distinctly underwhelming. Take a look at the closest thing to a changelog I could find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET#.NET_Framework_1... And I particularly draw your attention to the list of changes in 2.0, which include but are not limited to: Generics, 64-bit support, partial classes, nullable types, anonymous methods, and iterators. Maybe nullable types shouldn't be on that list, but a language without any of those things is getting pretty old fashioned.
Sure, C# 1.0 is no COBOL, but there was little or nothing new about C#, and I'd hesitate to even call it modern for the time, even if it would have been hailed as a major triumph in 1975.
>>It was basically Java, but then dumbed down a bit, as I recall.
C# 1.0 had all the important features of Java 1.4 plus delegates, events, autoboxing, enumerations, operator overloading, indexers, foreach and a lot more.
IMHO 90% of enterprise developers today are using the features from C# 1.0/Java 1.2 + generics. It's not some Prolog/Lisp/Haskel clone, but far from old fashioned.
In particular, this quote from Dominic Connor is telling:
"...[snip]... As Zmei says [SLang] a GS only language, which even within GS is not exactly universally loved. I hear tales of tragically poor performance, and the inability to cope with modern programming. Think of it as a equivalent to C# 1.0, ie old fashioned.
I don't know how much it is seen as protecting IP, but it is not clear how GS can give it up within the next decade even if they tried. There is just so much of it there.
There are spots of Java, VBA, and C++ in GS, who often value C++ experience in new hires, even if they don't use it.
The GS IT bonus pool is better than most people's IT bonus pool, but it's several tiers down. Mobility is no worse at GS than many other firms, but that is not saying much of course. Slang does in this context work to your advantage. Many IT department technologies have no value in quant and/or front office roles, but since Slang is prevalent in all aspects of GS, this barrier is much smaller. But of course the politics in all banks is far more of a problem than the technology."
Dominic is a very well known Quant head hunter. Well informed and generally well liked within the community. I'd wager that they don't want to use Slang in the spinoff simply because they have a change to do a reset and don't want the baggage.