you know you really do seem like the type that deals with programmers and their stubborness and know it allness.. i've hired developers before.. and i can literally see myself thinking like you do.. as i think alot of people don't measure the dev time as a quantity and weight that against the performance benefits..
Well, I can say that I chose to go independent and run my own shop for good reason, I know I am stubborn and at times confrontational. Now I can dictate the rules and kick those out who do not abide by the same (though the turnover rate is surprisingly low and I get along very well with the core crowd). My point all along comes down to your gist of the post which is that unless you work on highly performance critical code go with the most efficient tool. For most local machine projects that do not run on Linux boxes that is at the moment Java and C#, with C++ thrown in at critical corners. I respect and use C++ myself where it really makes a difference but saying C makes sense to be used for web related stuff, using C to perform file I/O, is like saying C# is the best tool to do some quick string parsing and not Python or the like. If I want to quickly profile micro market structure dynamics I would never write up code in C# but rather run some scripts in R or Matlab. My main amusement and sometimes gripe is with programmers who hold on to the religious belief that the tool they know the best fits the bill no matter what problem is thrown at them. I could not care less what some anonymous guy on this site is doing, whether his employer has enough patience and budget to have him toy around with re-writing every last library just so that he gets his integer conversion fetish satisfied or not. What I care more about is to recommend to someone who OBVIOUSLY does not work with high frequency feed handlers that he should rewrite his code to perform integer conversions just because someone claims the world will end if he does not (= which is the same as saying results will be so skewed due to rounding errors that they become unusable). That is hogwash and again a result of a programmer who displays a tunnel view and is stuck in his own little prison. Anyone who still uses Fortran or Cobol today (unless he.she is maintaining legacy code) is doing something majorly wrong. In the end those guys are still paid by someone who runs a profit maximizing business enterprise and some programmers on payroll really fail to appreciate and comprehend such fact. That is why I became confrontational. As long as they stick to their own routine and abide from recommending hogwash to newbies or the less experienced I could not care less but what some recommended the OP to do is the same as telling a newbie "trader" to first subscribe to Bloomberg to watch market data. (keep in mind unless some I tried to get an impression about the OP's level of expertise and someone who takes out a bank loan in order to trade in my book qualifies as someone who should not be recommended to perform integer conversions because he obviously does not deal with data feeds that convert to integer base).
This thread is incredible. There are clearly very smart / informed people on all sides of this argument, although in my book their intelligence is called into question based on the fact that they participated in Yet Another Flame War for like 18 pages or something. You know, if the talented programmers / traders on ET got together and formed a prop firm, I would bet real bucks that it would be extremely successful. Assuming everybody did not spend their time writing rabid posts on ET and actually did something productive .
So are you calling your own intelligence into question here? You mean, kind of like you do? Don't stop posting dude, your hilarious diatribes are by far the most entertaining thing on this site at the moment.
You're confusing hft_boy with hftvol. Next time you decide to have a go at someone, make sure you get your facts right, otherwise you end up looking like the village idiot.
Dude, that's cool. You gotta chill out a bit. I for one was groovin' out on some of your posts. You see, misaki is like a seagull. She'll join a thread discussion, drop some seagull shit and then spew some crap and phuck off once she is opposed. ET is full of comedy. Once you see it like that, it's actually a pretty cool site.