I can see the benefits of this collection of tools within an all-in-one monolith. Ease of deployment is a big benefit. I can also see the costs. As a stack its probably better in some ways than how a lot of other businesses operate as well as worse. There's probably a lot both ways.
The mainframe mindset might be a factor here as well. The giant mainframe where all the magic happens is still a thing to behold and this is definitely part of banking's history and present. Mainframes are beasts and are still far from any kind of obsolescence. A monolithic Bank Python with a standardised set of libraries etc would slot right in to that mindset and way of thinking.
The part about programming languages frequently not having tables is interesting. The closest as mentioned is the hash, but you lose so much in that abstraction eg the relational aspects. The counter argument then becomes the obvious: why aren't you using a database library, or in a pinch, sqlite? Rightly so. Why would you add relational tables to python rather than have a generic python database spec or a collection of database connector libraries. Databases are separate and large projects in themselves.
I'd still be overly disturbed if they were running some old python 2.5 or similar. Just saying. That would be a source of pity.
The mainframe mindset might be a factor here as well. The giant mainframe where all the magic happens is still a thing to behold and this is definitely part of banking's history and present. Mainframes are beasts and are still far from any kind of obsolescence. A monolithic Bank Python with a standardised set of libraries etc would slot right in to that mindset and way of thinking.
The part about programming languages frequently not having tables is interesting. The closest as mentioned is the hash, but you lose so much in that abstraction eg the relational aspects. The counter argument then becomes the obvious: why aren't you using a database library, or in a pinch, sqlite? Rightly so. Why would you add relational tables to python rather than have a generic python database spec or a collection of database connector libraries. Databases are separate and large projects in themselves.
I'd still be overly disturbed if they were running some old python 2.5 or similar. Just saying. That would be a source of pity.