Risk.net: Functional programming reaches for stardom in finance

Would you like your software to be more reliable, harder to hack and cheaper to run? Then, if you aren’t already in on the act, it may be time to embrace functional programming – a maths-based approach that is challenging the status quo at financial firms.

Proponents of functional languages say they are better at handling certain financial operations than the dominant, so-called imperative languages. They will become even more relevant, these fans argue, with greater adoption of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) in finance, spurred in part by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association’s common domain model (CDM).

“Functional programming has been gaining popularity in banking for the past decade, but the pace is accelerating,” says Neil Mitchell, who has worked with functional languages at Credit Suisse, Standard Chartered and Barclays.

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