Succeeding with Functional-first Programming in Enterprise

| Basel

Succeeding with
Functional-First
Languages in Finance
Dr. Don Syme
Principal Researcher, Microsoft
dsyme@microsoft.com

Today: Some Simple Observations About

Quantitative Finance
Analytical Programming
Calculation Engines
Financial Engineering
Trading Engines
with

F#
(and associated technologies)

Let’s focus on the business perspective and its
correspondence to the technical features of F#
Mostly based on informal observations of >50
successful F# adoptions
fsharp.org/testimonials
some of the same lessons hold for
OCaml, Erlang, Clojure, Scala, …

I will use a standard methodology for
communicating “complex” products.

S
P
I
N

• Situation
• Problem
• Implication
TM

• Need

Part 1
What’s the Situation? What’s the Problem?

The Recurring Business Situation
“I lead a team developing…”
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Financial Models
Insurance Calculation Engines
Trading Platforms
Algorithmic Trading Systems
Online Recommendation Engines
Bio-informatics Algorithms
…

The Recurring Business Situation
“I lead a team developing…”
•
•
•
•
•
•

Analytical Components
…

The Recurring Business Problems
Time to Market
Efficiency

Correctness
Complexity

• for analytical components

Is Time to Market a Problem?
Late Models  Missed Trading Opportunities
Late Services  Missed Information Markets
Late Products  Software Business Failure

Is Correctness a Problem?
Buggy Models  Incorrect Values/Risks/Trades
Buggy Services  Reputation Loss
Buggy Products  Lost Customers

Is Efficiency a Problem?
Slow Models  Out-of-date Valuations/Risks
Slow Services  Can’t Scale Out
Slow Products  Customer Complaints

Is Intractable Complexity a Problem?

What’s the Need?
Analytical programmers delivering correct,
efficient components in the enterprise, on-time
This is the set of problems that functional-first
programming helps solve

Part 2 - Why?
Observations and Examples

Observation #1
At the core of every functional-first language
is this:
simple, correct, robust code for solving
complex problems

On Windows, Microsoft recommend
F# and the Visual F# tools
for your functional-first programming
needs

"Functional-first programming is a generalpurpose programming technique particularly
suited to tasks where Time-to-deployment,
Efficiency, Correctness and Taming
Complexity dominate."

"Examples include ETL pipelines, general
data-manipulation, calculation engines,
service implementation, programmatic UIs
and data science.

While these problems can be solved using
other programming paradigms, they are
particularly amenable to functional-first
programming."

Functional-first programming uses
functional programming as the initial
paradigm for most purposes, but employs
other techniques such as objects and
state as necessary.

Observation #2
A highly interoperable
language allows
rapid, non-intrusive
deployment and
integration of
components

… functional-first code is a part of a
larger solution. With F# your code
can be rapidly integrated and
deployed.

Observation #2 cont.
Interoperable
languages remove
entire phases from
the analytical software
development process.

…no R  C#
…no Mathematica  C++
…no Excel  Java

Observation #3
Strongly-typed
functional-first
languages maintain
efficiency
…as good as C# and Java,
and sometimes C++

Observation #4
Strongly-typed
functional languages
help analytical
programmers tackle
more complex
problems

…more time in the domain,
less time on nulls and object
hierarchies.

Recap – How Functional-first Helps
Simple, correct, robust code
Interoperability eliminates entire phases
Strong-typing gives efficiency
Analytical developers empowered to solve
complex problems

Example #1 (power company)
I have written an application to balance the national
power generation schedule … for an energy company.
...the calculation engine was written in F#.

The use of F# to address the complexity at the heart of
this application clearly demonstrates a sweet spot for
the language … algorithmic analysis of large data sets.
Simon Cousins (Eon Powergen)

Example #1 (power company)
Interoperation ... Seamless. The C#
programmer need never know.

Units of measure … a huge time
saver...it eradicates a whole class of
errors…

Parallelism …The functional purity ...
makes it ripe for exploiting the inherent
parallelism in processing vectors of
data.

Code reduction… … vectors and
Exploratory programming

…Working with F# Interactive allowed me
to explore the solution space more
effectively.

matrices…higher order functions eat these
for breakfast with minimal fuss, minimal
code. Beautiful.

Lack of bugs… Functional programming
Unit testing …a joy to test. There are no
complex time-dependent interactions
to screw things up….

can feel strange. .. once the type checker
is satisfied that’s often it, it works.

Example #3: F# in Insurance
I work for a large actuarial company... …Despite adopting
Agile/Scrum …the usual delays, complications and sometimes
…failures.
We used F#, and quickly created a system which would perform the
necessary calculations highly efficiently, in parallel, and with a
perfect match to the spreadsheet results.
All of the advantages which are commonly touted for F# do play out
in practice. Immutability, Easy Parallelisation, Expressiveness,
Testability, Conciseness, Flexibility, Productivity
[ Company name omitted ]

Example #4: Finance trading
platform Front End
F# + C# for Trading
Leverage F#’s features:
- extensive type system
- asynchronous workflows, agents and
immutable types
- rich pattern matching and parser support
“Experienced F# developers regularly solve problems
in days that would take weeks using more traditional
languages…solving complex problems in an elegant
and highly maintainable manner”
Phil Trelford, Trayport

Example #5: OCaml @ Jane St

source: http://www.janestcapital.com/yaron_minsky-cufp_2006.pdf

Example #6: F# in Biotech
...F# rocks - building algorithms for DNA processing and it's like a drug.
12-15 at Amyris use F#... A complete genome resequencing pipeline with
interface, algs, reporting in ~5K lines and it has been incredibly reliable,
fast and easy to maintain.. A suffix tree in 150 lines that can index
200,000 bases a second

F# v. Python: F# has been phenomenally useful. I would be writing a lot
of this in Python otherwise and F# is more robust, 20x - 100x faster to
run and faster to develop.

Darren Platt, Amyris BioTechnologies

Example #7: F# in Advertisement Ranking &
Rating @ Microsoft
Around 95% of the code in these projects has been developed in F#.
F# allowed for rapid development of prototypes, and thus also rapid
verification or falsification of the underlying mathematical models.
Complex algorithms, for example to compute Nash equilibria in game
theory, can be expressed succinctly.
Units of measure reduced the chance of errors dramatically: Prices,
probabilities, derivatives, etc. can already be kept apart at compile time.

Example #8: F# at Kaggle
At Kaggle we initially chose F# for our core data analysis algorithms
because of its expressiveness.

We’ve found ourselves moving more and more of our application …into
F#. The F# code is shorter, easier to read, easier to refactor, and,
because of the strong typing, contains far fewer bugs.
As our data analysis tools have developed, we’ve seen domain-specific
constructs emerge very naturally. As our codebase gets larger, we
become more productive.


Example #9: F# for Machine Learning at
Microsoft
I wrote the first prototype of the click prediction system deployed in
Microsoft AdCenter in F# in a few days.

For a machine learning scientist, speed of experimentation is the critical
factor to optimize.
Unlike C# and C++, F# was designed for this mode of interaction.
Switching to F# was liberating and exhilarating.
The world is moving toward functional programming with good
justifications: the code is cleaner and easier to debug in a distributed
environment.
Dr. Patrice Simard, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, fsharp.org/testimonials

Summary – The Data Agrees
Simple, correct, robust code
Interoperability improves time-to-market
Strong-typing gives efficiency
Analytical developers empowered to solve
more complex problems

Today you will hear about…
F# Basics

F# for Data
Science

F# for
Pricing

F# for GPUs

F# for DSLs
in Risk and
Insurance

F# for Cloud
Data

F# + R

Proposition 1
The world is information-rich

The Information Revolution

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

2012

2013

6,432 10,537

Proposition 2
Our languages are informationsparse

Actually these days it’s more like a flood…

The Problem for Data
Our programming tools are data-sparse
getting data into a programming language is tiresome, error prone and boring

We need to bring financial data into
the language…
At full market-scale, strongly tooled, strongly
typed

Demo
F# + Xenomorph TimeScape
An F# type provider gives deep, simple, robust integration of financial
data, at massive, worldwide-scale, both in-cloud and on-premise

JavaScript/TypeScript

19/12/2013

60

In Summary – F#
Open, crossplatform, strongly
typed, efficient, rocksolid stable

Unbeatable data
integration

The safe choice for
functional-first

F#
Visual F# - tooling you
can trust from Microsoft

To find out more…
Learn F# at tryfsharp.org (including financial)
Lots of resources at fsharp.org
Testimonials at fsharp.org/testimonials
Over 100 videos at fsharp.org/videos

Succeeding with Functional-first Programming in Enterprise

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