(1) I'm not a "quant". I've always wondered what that beast looks like; (2) My conclusion was arrived at on the basis of what I learned about "quants" in this thread.
Indeed nbates, you're bringing up something sensible now. Lots of (old?) boys in this thread merely swinging their weight around and boasting about their 20+ years tinkering with lots of stuff. Today, of not much help in choosing the "best language for quantative finance". BTW, is .NET a language?
Well then, if you are truly interesting in what a quant is and does, you should make the effort and find out for yourself - and that won't be from a prog lang thread on ET. Otherwise, your conclusions are for all intents baseless and bereft of any inferential rigor. Hope your trading doesn't suffer from the above mentioned 'inferential disease', a common affliction of the 95%+ losers in the markets.
You indeed posted a lot of useless stuff in this thread. Given the apparent general confusion about "quant", how come you couldn't put in something decent about it? Are we to take it that "quant" is some kind of Soho slang term?
You're thinking SciPy, all the linear algebra codes, solvers, etc, built on top of NumPy. I have looked at the internals of numarray and NumPy. They are very straightforward and legacy free. Certainly no Fortran. Martin
"Ooh, look Mrs Marsh, it does get in!". The truth hurts old boy. ...and speaking of useless stuff - nn's mindless drivel above is a perfect example of more written effluent from ET's #1 non-contributor. I have already pointed people to the right places. If you are unwilling to look for yourself instead of spewing out the uninformed shite you do so frequently - and I might add - with abandon, then you are a bigger fuckwitt than you appear. Be good. HTH PS. The people in Soho can actually spell that word - they might be described as cunning linguists. PPS. You REALLY need a girlfriend
I did a full SciPy installation some (6?) months ago, if I recall at the time the new version came out and I definitely had to install Fortran runtime for that - quite some routines were dependent on it. In truth, I did not check any further before writing the above recent post and must have overlooked these implementation details of numarray and NumPy. In fact SciPy is much larger than both these together. Thank you for clarifying this matter.
gosh I feel like a babe in the woods here. if I'm about coming up with efficient little apps to do analysis and possible customize the front end of an order entry platform, maybe even crunching some numbers then sending orders auto, is VB.NET the way to invest my time? Or C##? I bring up VB because user interface is important to me, a user. (please don't suggest JAVA).
alright it's clear there are alot of loyal Pythons here, and if we had infinite amount of money with super programmers, C++ probably is the right move.. but let's face it, for an individual, what's the most efficient solution? C++ is obviously the most marketable, but for an independent house doing their own thing in a cost-efficient practical way, in TIME, what get's the job done? is the mili seconds extra speed that an optimized C++ can offer worth the cost-benefit of learning it? remember no one here really wants to design microsoft offices or some retails application. we're talking a language that is practical, and allows theoretical models to be done in ease without spending 3 years reading volumes with a constant reference book at hand.. from everything i've read here, i think if you're smart, you'll go the Python way.
Here's the deal: What are you tring to do? Do you just run tests or thinking of actually getting into developing an automated order system afterwards. How far is the computation going to go? Are you thinking of testing under a cluster / super computer enviornment or just running simple "text book" studies? The thread starts off as "quantitative finance" but... taking a textbook academic with a Ph.D. studying "econometrics", "financial engineering", "statistics", "computer science" and all the other academic genre that can by applied to finance is too broad and even more it doesn't work. I've yet to find a "textbook" material by itself make a person a billionaire. (Whether it be Technical, Fundamental, Discretionary, System, Mechanical, Quantitative, Algorithmic, etc. etc. it's the wisdom that makes money... aka. the trader himself) Even more: Are you asking because you want to be a quant. researcher in a bank? Is there something you want to test and seeking what the "best" way is to test it? Batman... lemme ask you something... what's a "quant" in your definition and let us know some details about the capability of yourself towards being a "quant. I think you need to start there to get a real answer. PS. I don't agree with Python.