On Thu, 18 Mar 2021 at 20:48, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> #1 everyone's cell phone (and I mean *everyone's* that isn't a gate array prototype) is built by fab machines controlled using Smalltalk.  ControlWORKS is the distributed control system built in Smalltalk built by Texas Instruments, funded by DARPA, in the late '80's.  ControlWORKS is now owned by Rudolph, an Austrian company.  ControlWORKS is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk.   See Lam Research's Smalltalk use. The only kind of machine Lam don't make is lithography.  Their machines, or machines built by copying their machines, build everything else.  AMD has (had?) their own fab plant, also using ControlWORKS.  Essentially all of the world's chips are made in wafer fab machines controlled by Smalltalk.  The value of wafers is such (> $1m per wafer) and the physics used so bleeding edge that to achieve down times below 4 hours per year a dynamic language is necessary for in-production maintennance.

This I had not heard of. Impressive.

> #2. also VisualWorks, OOCL's ISIS 2 software, a hybrid of Smalltalk and C++ schedules > 60% of world container traffic.  Scheduling container traffic is complex. Optimal loading and unloading order decides ship balance, and delivery time.  A given container's contents may be bought and sold more than once during shipping, cuz shipping takes several days (eg 4 days China to US).  There's some very interesting spicy history with sales of ISIS 2.  OOCL sold a copy to COSCO, the Chinese state shipping company.  The agreed price involved the governorship of Hong Kong going to a member of OOCL's owning family.

Ditto... fascinating!

> #3. JPMorganChase's system of record is a Smalltalk database.  Also part of the Kapital system is a futures and derivatives trading "spreadsheet" that allows traders to deal in probability envelopes, which is informed by a simulation of the world's financial markets.  All of this is a combination of GemStone and VisualWorks Smalltalk.  Kapital paid for the entire $35 m initial development cost in the first 4 days of operation.  In the early years of the century I was informed it generated $1.1B annual profits for JPMC.  Notably Kapital survived attempts to replace it both with Java and Python competitors on more than two occasions, surviving the merger of JPM & Chase.  I'm also informed that the simulation system maxed out gigabit fibre in generating data and caused the meltdown of processors in a datacentre.

My ex-fiancée is or was one of the programmers who built that, and
I've probably at least seen a demo of some tiny part of it. So this
one, yes, I did know about. Fantastic anecdote, though.

> #4. BMW's parts library, the back end of their CAD system, is a VisualWorks application.
>
> #5. Deutsche Bahn's timetable is a VisualWorks app.  This is challenging because there are equipment failures and track failures on a daily basis and so the timetable is a live application making rescheduling decisions constantly.
>
> and the list goes on; for example several leading insurance companies use Smalltalk.  To understand why Smalltalk is used, the key attributes almost all these enterprise-class applications have is rapidly changing domains.  For example, JPMC's market simulation has to deal with regulations changing around the globe.  Kapital has a 4 day release cycle.  Static languages simply can't keep up with the rate of change.

Absolutely wonderful stuff. Thank you!

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