A few months back, Kevin introduced us to the Hedgehog Programming language – (here’s the post if you missed it).

The Palantir Finance programming language — Hedgehog as we know it — is an interpreted, statically typed, object-oriented language. With a syntax that’s based loosely on Java, it mixes roughly Java-style semantics and a few idiosyncrasies that make it a really interesting case study in language design. It’s built to be extremely efficient for batch operations on time series, which is the heavy lifting in financial analysis.

In this video, Eugene and Dave, two of the engineers that work on the language and platform features needed to support it, give a talk that goes into a number of areas around the Hedgehog language, including why we needed to build a language, how it makes the platform more powerful, how we built dev tools into the UI to make debugging easier, and a bunch of the nitty-gritty features that go into the strange (but fitting) beast that is the Hedgehog Language.

As a final note: this is one of things that I love about working at Palantir Technologies. We study a problem pretty hard before we decide that we need to re-invent the wheel – and then when we do, we go all out. It’s one of the benefits of working with the incredibly talented and motivated folks here. When someone says, “well, we need to build a programming language. No, we’re sure,” we just roll up our sleeves and do it. We can add it to the list of: JMX monitoring system, refined Lucene search engine, speeding up Map-Reduce-like systems to interactive time, and implementing our own GIS platform.