Not Waving But …

Well this is very interesting. A highly concurrent, safely distributed, dynamically updateable, highly reliable platform is just what is needed for a stock exchange or ECN (which is really just a less regulated exchange for other assets anyway).

Of course it will not help in a lot of areas. One of the irritating problems building financial systems is that so much is arbitrary. It evolved in an ad hoc manner with a huge amount of Not Invented Here going on; just look at the number of “Standard” Unique Identifier systems there are for Equities (You have to support them all…). No programming system will fix that, but being able to focus on managing it well because you are building on top of a system that runs phone switches (which are about as reliable as you get; outside Aerospace and Nuclear Installations) will be interesting.

I will be following Joel’s work if I can; and I’ll probably end up buying yet another Pragmatic Programmer title.