Friday, June 25, 2010

U.S. SEC endorses Python to fix financial problems

News from PCWorld is mentioning that ActivePython, the software distrbution from ActiveState, is going to include numerical, scientific, and optimization software with its current software bundle.  The numerical and optimization software it is going to include is Python based NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib.  All of the new software is open source and available for free download.

Apparently this is in anticipation to the new U.S. financial rules from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  On April 7, 2010 the U.S. S.E.C. proposed new rules for Asset-Backed Securities that will enable the markets to run efficiently and fairly.  On the first page of the released documents from the S.E.C. they mention the use of Python.  That is a nice shocker to us open source advocates.

Python is a great computing language.  It is really easy to learn compared to the other languages such as C.  Perhaps the U.S. S.E.C. thought it would be the best choice because of its ease of use and abundance of software packages.  This is really interesting news and hopefully we will be hearing more about it in the near future.

1 comment:

d.alan.ridgeway said...

This is rather cool. I downloaded the .pdf file from the SEC. While the paper admitted this is not a final judgment and did ask for comments about using other languages, I think for the intent of SEC Python makes a lot of sense. One of the great strengths of Python is clarity of code syntax. The goal of the SEC is to demonstrate the financial health of a company not just by the final balance sheet and transactions, but also by the algorithms used to determine the positions. Using Python to communicate the algorithms seems to make sense in moving to that goal.