Troll Technology (QT) Releases Scripting Language

OopChugALug writes "Troll Tech last night released a beta of QSA, which stands for QT Scripting Language for Applications. Download here. As a business apps developer for a major financial institution's trading floor, I know the traders will love this. Hopefully, with QSA, I can get rid of Excel, and give the traders Spreadsheet widgets, with the flexibility of a 'VBA-like' scriptability to boot!"

Comments

When hell freezes over, pigs fly, et cetera.

[cyberkreiger]

Hopefully, with QSA, I can get rid of Excel, and give the traders Spreadsheet widgets, with the flexibility of a 'VBA-like' scriptability to boot!"

Yes, yes, very likely!

Re:When hell freezes over, pigs fly, et cetera.

[e8johan]

QSA shows the great hidden abilites of the Qt toolkit. Hopefully the code will show how easy this is so that a free VBA compatible version will appear rendering all (non-viral) Windows scripts runnable in a free environment. This is one of the major things M$ Office has today, the scriptability. It is not great, not even good according to some (me) but it is there and works.

Hopefully

[Strange Ranger]

'Lug, you aren't going to roll something out to your Trading Desk with "no support and no warranty"?

Are you?

Re:Hopefully

[b_pretender]

Trading support software is developed in-house at *all* of the investment banks (i.e. Supported in house, no warranty).

What's unusual is that this guy (story's original author) thinks that he's going to get the said traders to move away from Excel. Yeah, that will happen when Enron regains its credibility as a market maker. I got news for him. The traders drive the trader-support tools. He should think to stop using excel *after* the traders start asking him to stop using excel.

All traders everywhere use Excel. All Risk depts everwhere use Excel. A majority of quant modeling is done with excel.

Please post any exceptions below, because I'm interested in knowing who doesn't use excel.

A final point is that VBA for Excel is highly polished and the best currently available. It's very easy to code and compile C++ DLLs that directly link into Excel through VBA. A lot of people are doing this, there's a lot of information available, .net promises to make this even easier to do, and there's little reason to switch to something different.

Re:Hopefully

[JabberWokky]

I worked for a revenue stream purchaser (the kind of people who buy lottery streams, etc). The guy who calculated everything had an Excel spreadsheet he used for it all - billions of dollars of streams. He knew about Excels quirks and bugs and he did the major calculations twice using different formula and methods to arrive at the answers. I once asked him what he did when they didn't match - and they often didn't. "Choose the one that benefits us the most" was his reply.

No wonder why they use Excel. :)

--
Evan "Thinks Word 97 is the best WP to date, but not a fan of Excel"

Re:Hopefully

[Strange Ranger]

Trading support software is developed in-house at *all* of the investment banks (i.e. Supported in house, no warranty).

Um..I work with a trading desk every day. Some of it is in-house, much of it isn't. There's a huge list of vendors that supply trading desk applications. Many of them sell software with Excel plugin capability. Bloomberg and Bridge come to mind. And you're right, why in the world would you switch away from Excel.

Regardless of all that, if one of our developers downloaded an obscure scripting language with no support and started rolling out custom applications I'm pretty sure we'd escort him to the door on the spot. Things like compliance, due diligence, split second transaction accountability, Business Recovery, transparency, etc all mean you can't just toss out whatever widgets you like. Can you imagine rolling out trade balancing tools to a trading desk writting in unsupported language 'Foo', and then putting in your 2 week notice?

Re:just what we need

[eddy the lip]

It's based on ECMAscript, so it's not really learning a whole other language. This was smart on TrollTech's part - no one's interested in learning a whole other language just to interface with pretty widgets. This'll make it very accessible to a lot of developers.

Should open up some interesting possibilities for KDE, too.

wxWindows: wxPython, wxBasic, wxLua

[Nicolay77]

wxWindows has native look and feel over all the supported platforms, not emulated, and has several scripting languages.

Nothing beats wxPython for what you want to do.
There is even wxLua (a very fast light scripting language) and wxBasic for the fanatics of that language.

Re:Released, really?

[Nicolay77]

QT is not free if you want to do commercial applications. wxWindows is.
And I'm not really convinced that it's better, unless you think only in KDE.

Anyway, wxWindows already has several scripting language bindings. (I forgot wxPerl too)

ANOTHER scripting language?

[metalhed77]

why not just make libs available to do what this language does for perl, python, etc.

Troll Technology

[Hubert_Shrump]

Troll(/.) {
case FP:
? FP[Rnd]
case Soviet:
reverse(HeadLine)
? "in soviet russia, $1 $2es you!"
case Ascii:
for (!filtered)
? Rand_Art
case ReadArticle:
restate(wrongly+inflammatoryDeclaration)
case !ReadArticle:
restate(wrongly+inflammatoryDeclaration)
case Beo:
? "imagine a beowulf cluster of $1"
case AYB:
? "All your $1 are belong to $2"

Re:Troll Technology

[StandardDeviant]

case (location == SovietRussia):
? "case switches YOU!"

The K Language

[Jayson]

For those of you who don't know about K here are two resources.

My quick intro: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/14/22741/791

A wiki entry written by David Ness: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?KayLanguage