1. Admit I'm not. 2. Call programmer. 3. Speak english. 4. Pay money. 5. Interpret response (usually not english, some programmer talk). 6. Pay endlessly for upgrades. 7. Make programmers rich(er). On a serious note, however, my guys who have great trading strategies and skills, but no programming skills. So, by being traders first, with good strategies, and developing programs "with" experts, results have been very good. In my experience, when programmers try to develop trading systems that are not already proven via live trading history, the former sequence of events seems to have worked better. FWIW, Don (not a programmer) Bright
Damn, I thought I could have some hopes And I'm not even making all this nice financial applications all the previous posters are talking about. I'm getting very envious
1. What language did you start with? Radio Shack TRS-80 Basic - in 1982, my first programming job was to translate some trading system software from Apple II Basic to TRS-80 Basic. Shortly thereafter we bought a compiler for the Apple II basic from this tiny Seattle company called Microsoft, it came in one of those cheap looking brown plastic cases that remind me of VHS tape cases but in really tacky brown fake wood finishes. 2. What language do you know the best ? C++ but it is way too complicated at times. I really liked Object Pascal much better. 3. What was the coolest program you ever made ? Back when Apple first moved off the Motorola 68XXX chips to the PowerPC chips they announced that they would not support an Object Pascal compiler for the new software. This was one of a long line of idiotic moves in the dark days of Steve Job's banishment from his own creation. About 70% of the commercial software written for the Macintosh at the time was written in Object Pascal. This meant that most commercial software companies now faced a massive porting job from Object Pascal to C or C++ (depending if objects had been used or not in the source). I ran a small company that sold tools to Macintosh developers. We needed to port those tools as well. We purchased the rights to a product that one of our customers had used to do some in-house translation to C from Object Pascal. At the time, it was a good tool but very incomplete. I spent about two months turning it into a complete product that handled the entire language and even preserved formatting and comments in the code and conditional compilation (i.e. the Pascal equivalent of #if). We called it "p2c" after the original in-house name. This was very important for large commercial projects as the formatting and comments were an important part of the source code. We then sold it for $9,500 to about 30 or 40 different companies. It was used by almost all the large software companies to do their translations. 4th Dimension, FileMaker, all the biggest software companies. We wanted to license it to Apple so they could give it to smaller developers who could not afford the $9K and had an agreement to do so for a single $100K payment. Unfortunately for these developers, the idiot executives at Apple couldn't justify the expense. So that meant a lot of smaller shops just switched their efforts and ported to Windows instead. There was a massive shift to Windows ports instead of ports to the C++ for supporting the Macintosh when the PowerPC chip was introduced. The leading software companies were all Macintosh companies who released first on the Macintosh and then on Windows. After this shift, many started to release on Windows first and some even dropped the Macintosh platform completely. p2c - was completely turnkey. Point it at the source and it would translate it, it would even map OS calls that had changed between versions. The resulting C++ source would compile and run without changes. After we did our own translation of our database product there were two bugs which were because of hand changes we had made, the machine generated code worked fine. 4. How long have you been coding It has been about 24 years now. The tools have changed but the problems remains the same. - Curtis
I started with FORTRAN. I know C the best. I learned C++ but never used it much at work. Most of the C++ code I've seen doesn't seem to make use of the better features of object-oriented programming. It just seems like a bigger and more complicated mess than C code used to be. I mostly coded as part of larger projects. I did turn a single-processor system into one that could run across multiple processors with various boundaries, and independent of processor architecture. I started in the mid 70's (not counting the first FORTRAN class in 1970).
That is an amazing story. You were at ground-0 in one of the most pivotal corporate battles in history (Apple vs Microsoft). One person really can make a difference and see some excitement if they are in the right place at the right time. 1. I started with Atari-400 Basic for fun around 1st grade. Professionally, my first language was C++. 2. I've been mostly using Perl so I know that the best. I would say that most popular languages these days (C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby) are more similar than different in terms of once you've mastered a few, picking up new languages is pretty easy to do. 3. I made a very early "massively multiplayer role-playing game" prototype in college in 1997. I was planning on working on it for several more years on the side even after graduation and taking it commercial-- however I then found out Ultima Online was coming out and was discouraged. I felt my timing was off in that I would lose first-mover advantage, and secondly that their resources (budget) and game quality would be much higher than my 3-man show, so I stopped working on the project. I'm not sure if that was the right decision or not, but with 20/20 hindsight probably I should of at least spent 6 months shopping for venture capital before calling it quits. 4. I've been coding professionally for 10 years, mostly database and server side web programming. I'm managing a remote team of developers currently. In my spare time, I still work on coding projects, many of which are trading related. -Taric