It involves the use of an obscure, French programming language

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Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi

Hedge funds will go to great lengths in pursuit of profits, whether it is by counting cars in satellite photos of parking lots or shipping gold across the Atlantic. Building a compiler—a piece of software that turns human-written code into programs a computer can execute—for your homegrown language? That still raises eyebrows.

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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “A large hump”

From the June 28th 2025 edition

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