Programming Languages in Banking: A Comparative Analysis

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Language Design Essay
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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Background................................................................................................................................3
Purpose of languages in banking................................................................................................4
Programming languages for banking.........................................................................................5
Comparison of languages...........................................................................................................8
Selection of language...............................................................................................................10
Justification for the selection...................................................................................................11
Conclusion................................................................................................................................12
References................................................................................................................................13
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Introduction
The report assessment is based on knowledge enhancement in the field of programming
languages in the banking sector. In the sector of banking, the languages are very useful and
beneficial. Many languages are used and each of the language has its own characteristics and
benefits. Some of the languages have good dynamic memory management while others
support abstraction. Some are simple to design while others are complex but more efficient.
Every language is designed and developed to perform special functions or to improve the
found glitches. The report includes a discussion on the programming languages along with
their characteristics, benefits, and disadvantages. The comparison is made between the
languages for programming ion the banking sector so that the understanding can be clear and
the proper and efficient selection can be made. Languages are used because they are good at
increasing speed and producing efficient outcomes. The main comparison is made on the
scoping features and the memory management of each language.
Background
The growth of the banking sector is increasing day by day and has been seen enormous
growth especially in the past decades. Initially the banks were just to deposit and withdraw
the money but now they have been changed into the large organizations that offer large
variety of services and products (Ozgur, et. al., 2019). The classification of the banks can be
done on the basis of services, products, statues, customers, segments, etc. The bank now
offers various payment solutions like online transactions by the platform creation that allows
such service. The basic services are the account opening of the customers, maintain the funds
received, depositing and withdrawing of money, etc. The most important features that the
application of banking must exhibit are as follows:
 The language chosen for programming must be easily integrated with the databases,
excel, word, etc.
 The storage should be enough and the allocation of the memory should be precise.
 The memory management should be done is such a way that it could handle a large
amount of data easily.
 The creation of the language should be done in a way that it can be able to deploy
easily on any of the platform (Hilpisch, 2016).
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 The developed software should be able to simultaneously and efficiently handle the
user sessions.
 The developed application should not take a long time in buffering or processing as it
will delay the process and the results will also not be efficient.
 The process for audit should be clear, easy, and efficient so that the problems can be
easily resolved on time and the queries of the customer can be easily answered.
 The language should be capable of providing the good capability so that the other
member that will be working on it can easily understand the previous process and can
resume the work from where it is left (Cooke, et. al., 2019).
 The ACID property should be provided by the language. The ACID stands for
characteristics like atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.
 The application and the software should be able to recover the data and should take
the regular backups so that at the time when the system crashes, the data can remain
safe.
 The application for banking must support services like safe online transactions, card
related services, loans, funds, etc.
Purpose of languages in banking
The banking sector works on various services and products for the wellbeing of the people.
To provide ease to the customers, the banking focuses on the application that can help the
customer to do everything online without standing in the long queues (Ozgur, et. al., 2019).
The banking segments include various different sectors like finance, business, customer
relation management, accountability, deposit, withdraw, funds, loans, etc. To reach every
sector is quite difficult for the people and hence they use the application more for the process
that can be easily done online, as the transferring of funds, withdrawing, checking balance,
loan application, etc. To develop such an application, the use of programming language is
necessary. It provides great efficiency. The features of the programming languages that can
be used in the sector of baking or financial sectors are:
 It maintains the code and also allows the reusability of the code.
 The tasks by the language are performing at high speed and hence the overall time is
saved.
 It provides the reliability of the design.
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 Programming languages help to provide the banking application sand software that
can easily provide the functions of the services.
 It offers flexibility in the process of design.
 The technical problems can be offered with easy solutions that are relatable to the
structures and the data types.
 It offers the robustness to the functions and this is referred to as the main
functionality.
 The programming language provides the security of the data that keeps sensitive
information private and confidential.
 The correctly written code provides the correct and precise results with high accuracy.
 With the help of the programming languages, the searching of the data is easy and
also accurate and efficient. One needs not to go through the database for the searching
of information (Hilpisch, 2016). The writing of the code is only required and the
language will do it work and the required data will be seen.
Programming languages for banking
There exist different programming languages in the market that are capable of serving
different tasks and professions. Java and Python are respectively used for trading systems and
investment banks. MATLAB and R are used for the data analysis and the statistics. C++ is
used for the systems that use risk and numerical management (Lee, et. al., 2011). Different
programming bases are served by different applications. The assessment is about the
programming language in the banking and financial sector. Every bank has its own
functionality and requirement and according to it the programming language of the
application of the bank changes. Hence, There are various types of programming languages
that can be used efficiently in the banking and financial sector (Ozgur, et. al., 2019). The
software can also be developed using languages for programming. The main function of the
banking application is to provide the customers the functionality to transfer the funds. The
bank also serves people with many more functions such as maintaining the relations with the
customers, funds, deposit, withdraw, card management, security of the sensitive information
of the customer of banks, etc. Thus, the language should be selected that is capable of
performing all the mention tasks with great efficiency. The languages that are available and
can be used for the same purpose are C#, C++, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, etc. The sector of
finance and banking uses conservative technologies so that the consistency can be
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maintained. The technology should be capable of providing security, reliability, flexibility,
and stability. The languages selected by the banking sector are static and flexible. These
languages must be able to develop the software and the application. The description of the
languages is provided below to get the detailed knowledge about the languages and how they
will be used in the banking applications.
 C#: the C# is the programming language that offers several features which include the
low latency. The quantity characteristics are offered by the language. This is the
language that is used in many areas and is now become popular. The use of this is
because of its collaboration and integration with Windows. It is collaborated with the
active directory and office for the internal process to be carried out. It can be taken
into account and considered when there is a need for developing the application for
the banks. The SSO directory can be used for the data displaying. This can be done
with the help of web services (Hilpisch, 2016). The syntax of the C# language is
almost similar to another programming language popularly known as C++. The use of
the language is commonly used while developing games, .NET application, and
mobile applications. The C# provides the feature that says the function made in
another language can be extended or can be used in the C# language. This is the main
benefit of using this language which shows great collaboration and integration. The
uninitialized variables cannot be used in this language and hence for using the
variables they need to be initialized first.
 C++: C++ provides the functionality at a very high speed and therefore it is used in
the banking and finance sector. It provides efficiency and the performance is also
good and hence it is always preferred first. It is capable of debugging the code and
develops the application quickly and efficiently. It is very feasible to use as this is an
object-oriented programming language. These results and outcomes of the set of
instructions are very efficient and feasible. The sector of banking requires
computation, calculations, and evaluations at a very fast rate. In the bank there are
various computations that need to be done and need to be completed on time and as
fast as possible. Thus, for this purpose the C++ language is very beneficial and useful.
The bank sometimes comes across complex situations and wishes to have a
quantitative analysis (Nagpal & Gabrani, 2019). The code for the analysis can be
easily written in the C++ language and the same code can be used again and again
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because it offers the feature of reusability. The libraries are also provided which can
be used for the templates which can be used for easy coding purpose.
 Python: the risks can be easily managed by the python in the banking and financial
sector. The features provided by the python are very useful and beneficial as the
sector wants many types of computations which can be done by the modules of the
python-like the NumPy, SciPy, etc. The language also offers machine learning
algorithms that can be useful for data analysis (Lee, et. al., 2011). It has gained huge
importance and is being widely used. The language exhibits a dynamic and agile
nature. It supports the abstraction at the layers of backend and only provides the front
end to the customers. This has gained so much significance in the last few years that it
is now being used to analyze the cryptocurrency trend. The language is so easy
because of its trends and also it can be easily understood by others as it offers high
readability. It is referred to as the scalable programming language. The language also
provides the documentation so in case if the developer finds himself/herself stuck in
the situation, the documentation can be opened to gain insights into the functions or
methods (Hilpisch, 2016).
 Java: for providing the web service, the Java programming language is used by the
sector of finance and banking. It is an object-oriented language but cannot be said
that it is pure object-oriented. It provides the features of applets and graphical user
interfaces that can be used for developing the front end of the applications. It also
offers Java APIs which is the great feature (Nagpal & Gabrani, 2019). It is the
portable programming language that means it can be written on systems and can be
run on another. It is very much compatible. Any platform can be selected for running
the Java codes and hence referred to as the cross-platform programming language. It
is because when the code gets compile it converts the source code into the byte code
and when this byte code is run on JVM then it produces the actual output. It is used
because any type of application can be made using this as the mobile application,
enterprise application, desktop application, client-server application, and web
application (Degryse, et. al., 2019).
 Ruby: it is the high-level language that is used for the general purpose. It is also
known as the interpreted language. It uses garbage collection and is dynamically
typed. Various paradigms for programming are supported by the language. The
paradigms include object-oriented, functional programming, and procedural. It
exhibits many features (Kaya, et. al., 2019). Some of them are exception handling,
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garbage collection, operator overloading, dynamic reflection, duck typing, dynamic
typing, variable scopes, native threads, default arguments and many more. The syntax
is similar to Python and Perl. The methods and classes are written by the use of
keywords, and the block of codes is defined using the braces or the keywords
(McKinney, 2010). The instance variable in the Ruby are kept private and the
accessor methods are only capable of accessing them and using them. It is also very
useful language for developing the applications for the banking and finance sector.
 Scala: it is the programming language used for general purpose and provides the
functionality features. The source code of the Scala can be compiled to the byte code
of Java and this byte code can be run on any of the java virtual machines. The
libraries of the Scala are written in either of any two languages and can be easily
accessed. It uses the syntax in which the curly braces are used and it is object-oriented
programming (Ukpong, et. al., 2019). The features of the language are somewhat
similar to the java programming language. Some of the differences between both
languages are the data types and expressions. The additional features of the Scala
programming languages that re not supported by any of the languages are nested
functions, pattern matching, type interference, lazy evaluation, currying, tuples,
algebraic data types, higher-order functions, etc.
Comparison of languages
The following comparison is of the different programming languages on the basis of features
and characteristics of the language.
Features Python
programmin
g language
C++
programmin
g language
Scala
programmin
g language
C#
programmin
g language
Java
programmin
g language
Simplicity It is the
simple
language.
It requires
very long
codes.
The code is
written is
very long but
learning is
easy.
It is the
simple
language.
It is complex
and bigger
than the
languages C
and C++.
Syntax The code is
split into
It requires the
use of
The syntax is
easy and is
The syntax is
similar to the
For the
syntax, it
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numerous
logical
instructions.
keyword. similar to that
of java
programming
language.
C++ ad C
programming
languages.
uses
keywords.
Data types Numbers.
Tuples, lists,
sets,
dictionaries
Built-in and
user-defined
data types
Short,
Boolean,
integers,
doubles, byte
Values,
reference,
and pointers
The data
types are
divided into
primitive and
non-primitive
data types
Access control Name
mangling
Public,
private,
protected,
friends
Internal,
public,
protected
Internal,
public,
protected,
private
Packages,
public,
private,
protected
Type checking yes yes yes Yes yes
Inheritance Multiple Multiple Multiple Multiple and
single,
interfaces
Multiple and
single,
interfaces
Exception
handling
Yes, it
provides flow
control
Yes, it allows
the flow of
the abnormal
activities
Yes, it
provides flow
control
Yes, it allows
the flow of
the abnormal
activities
Yes, it
provides flow
control
Abstract
properties
yes yes yes Yes Yes but only
when the
keyword
abstract is
used
The paradigm
of object-
oriented
Hybrid Hybrid and
multiple
Hybrid Hybrid Hybrid
Pointer No Yes Yes Yes No
Static/dynamic Dynamic Static Static Static Static
Security No No Yes Yes Yes
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Uniform access No No No No No
Garbage
collection
Reference
counting
No Mark and
swipe
No Swipe, mark,
and
generational
Method
overloading
No Yes Yes Yes Yes
Multithreading Yes Libraries Yes Yes Yes
Operator
overloading
Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Platform Cross
platform
Linux and
Windows
Cross
platform
Common
infrastructure
Cross
platform
Paradigm Imperative,
reflective,
functional,
object-
oriented,
procedural
Generic,
object-
oriented
procedural
Structured,
imperative,
procedural
Structured,
reflective,
event-driven,
task-driven,
generic
Multi-
paradigm,
generic,
class-based,
structure,
concurrent,
imperative
Typing
discipline
Dynamic and
strong
Nominative,
inferred,
static
Nominal,
weak,
manifest,
static
Dynamic and
static, strong,
safe, partially
inferred
Safe. Static,
manifest,
strong
Selection of language
Python is the general-purpose language that is widely used. It is referred to as the high-level
programming language. This programming language was initially designed in 1991 by Guido
van Rossum. After the designing it was developed by the Python Software Foundation. The
main purpose of the language is to focus on the readability of the code and the syntax is also
easy which allows the developers to write the code in few lines (Hilpisch, 2016). It is the
flexible language that maintains the scripts, web services, and data analysis algorithms. It is
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defined as the good scripting language which can be easily integrated into back ends end and
front end. Hence, this is the reason, python is always chosen In the first place.
Justification for the selection
The python is selected because of the following reasons:
 Simplicity: developing the platform for the financial sector is already a complex and
difficult task, hence, the programming language should easy be easy so that the load
of the developers can be divided. The easy syntax of the python makes it the most
suitable language for any of the fields. It requires just a few lines of code to run a ling
task. The use of classes and inheritance is very simple and defining and using the
functions easily makes it more efficient and preferred language (Ukpong, et. al.,
2019).
 Software development time and cost to market: due to the easy syntax. The python is
less complex and hence the processing of the code is also very easy and fast. This
makes python the fastest processing language. It also fast in the metrics of time to
market (Degryse, et. al., 2019).
 Open source financial libraries: python offers many tools and libraries. The libraries
of mathematical programming are also provided by the python which is very useful in
the sector of banking. The most commonly known libraries are:
 NumPy: it is a package for scientific computing.
 SciPy: it is the package for technical and scientific computing.
 zipLine: it is a Pythonic algorithmic trading library.
 pyalgotrade: it is an algorithmic trading library.
 Pandas: it is a powerful and flexible data manipulation or analysis library.
 pyrisk: it is a common financial performance and risk,
 quantecon.py: it is a library for quantitative economics.
 pyfolio: portfolio and risk analytics.
 ffn: it is a financial function library.
 pynance: it is software that is open source used for analyzing, retrieving, and
visualizing the data.
 scikit-learn: it is a package for machine learning algorithms.
 pybitcointools: it is a library for Bitcoin themed python.
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 finmarketpy: it is backtesting trading strategies library and for analyzing
the financial markets (Nagpal & Gabrani, 2019).
 Greater collaboration: the python offers a great collaboration with the other languages
and also provides a collaborative environment. Due to the python’s simple
composition, it allows the developers to work closely with the professionals like the
data analyst, researchers and analyst on the project (Cooke, et. al., 2019).
The above explanation for selecting the python concludes that the simplicity of the python
language results in the hunting of fewer bugs and the error rates are also low. The python
might not be the fast processing language but it is good for time to market. The easy syntax
helps the developer to generate a great collaboration and the libraries of python provide the
readymade solution to the problems of banking (Kaya, et. al., 2019).
Conclusion
From the assessment report, it was concluded that are many programming languages that can
be used for the purpose of solving the problems in the banking sector. The languages just
have to be easy and readable. They should exhibit features like they should be able to take the
backup of the data and should allow the recovery process. The languages should be flexible
and also they must exhibit the ACID property. The languages that can be used in the banking
sector are C#, C++, Java, RUBY. Python, JavaScript, and many more such languages. The
python is selected for the preferred language among the mentioned languages because of its
efficiency and the features that it exhibits. The justification for the selection is also provided
that is able to make the understanding clear for the selection. The comparison among the
languages is also discussed to know the best language for the banking sector and it has also
made the process of selection easy.
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