The UK soccer league is the most popular sport in the UK, and has a huge following elsewhere in Europe as well as in South America and Asia. For many of the biggest teams, the majority of their fan-base is outside of the UK. For many people, playing or watching soccer is their primary leisure activity. There are 6-10 premier league games screened each weekend across a variety of channels, not to mention the other leagues (which also have huge followings going down into the 2nd, 3rd and 4th leagues) and the various regional and international competitions that UK teams compete in, as well as the untold hours of soccer-related programming that isn't showing games.

I don't think the comparison with a hypothetical reality TV show is very meaningful.

It is also useful for rewriting routines in the critical path for slower, but more productive languages. Particularly languages that need to do a lot of heavy-duty data crunching (think Python, R, Matlab, Octave).

I mean, I guess you could do that in C++ instead. But why would you bother if C is good enough (and it typically is for most numerical algorithms).

The situation is different because there isn't a 2000+ year history of Java developers discriminating against Lisp developers.

I don't think anybody is saying that being in a minority is justification for being aggressive. I think what some people are saying is that being oppressed might be a justification for being aggressive, but I can't say for certain. I'm just an average Asian who appears like an average Caucasian.

In fairness, thinking that 1 is a prime number (or just not knowing that it isn't) is in quite a different league to not knowing how to calculate the average of a list of numbers.

See my comment to the other reply. Ordinarily I'd agree, but these were all graduated undergrad math majors in a course about how to teach math (specifically prime numbers) to high schoolers.

It is one of the top-ranked universities in Canada (roughly equivalent to an Ivy League university in the US, or Oxbridge in the UK).

Which other asset classes are you thinking of? I think that most transactions in cash equities, spot fx and futures are now done electronically.

I'm sure that a large proportion of derivative trades are still done over the phone, but that's because they tend to be (a) quite customizable and (b) quite hard to price.

It is incredible that treasuries are still traded over the phone, however, given how (relatively) easy they are to price. Even treasury futures, which are harder to price due to the basis and optionality, are mostly traded electronically, which tells me that there must be some parties with a pretty strong interest in keeping bond trading a "closed shop".

tptacek already responded to your previous comment about Flash Boys below [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045150

The trouble with this argument is that, on basically every exchange in the world, you do not get to find out if someone has matched with your passive order until after the trade has happened.

There is no possibility to "back away when a matching order comes in" because the first time you find out about the matching order is when you are informed about the trade that you just did!

What can happen is that a market maker will post liquidity on multiple exchanges A, B and C, and will remove their orders from exchanges B and C if they are filled on exchange A (assuming they are fast enough to do it!)

This is not shady or nefarious. In fact, it is the only way that a distributed market could possibly work.

The market maker has some finite capacity to provide liquidity (e.g. they have position limits, they need to post margin, they have certain risk tolerances). They want to maximise the chances of their orders being traded on (i.e. providing liquidity), so they post liquidity on all available markets.

When they match on one of those markets, their capacity to provide liquidity has diminished, until they manage to offset their position somewhere (either on the same market, or on a different one). Moreover, they have just received a new piece of information about the supply/demand imbalance for this particular stock. For both of these reasons, it is natural to assume that they would want to adjust the prices they are offering on other exchanges. The market cannot function any other way.

I like asking programmers to think about the CAP theorem when they consider this problem.

That would be a groupoid - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupoid

No, groupoids breaks the group operation and thus behaves like neither of the groups. Do type systems allow operations between union types? If not then it is just a simple interface in OO. If they do then you are no longer working with pure functions.

No. For example, a FilePath is (after resolving a few other type aliases)

  data Root
	  = RootPosix
	  | RootWindowsVolume Char
	  | RootWindowsCurrentVolume

  data FilePath = FilePath
	  { pathRoot        :: Maybe Root
	  , pathDirectories :: [String]
	  , pathBasename    :: Maybe String
	  , pathExtensions  :: [String]
	  }