Hi Liam,

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 6:28 AM Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 at 09:45, Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Liam.
> >
> > > [...] but a couple of the other points seem quite telling... or do
> they?
> >
> > Is this a typical low-effort "You tell me why I should care?"-situation?
> :-)
>
> :-(
>
> Well, no. I did present a talk advocating Smalltalk as a possible
> basis for a next-generation OS just last month and have discussed it
> at some length on this ML. But I am not in any way an expert in it. I
> tweeted about it, and now Twitter is showing me tweets about
> Smalltalk, including this one.
>
> Honestly, I hoped that some Squeak practitioners here might want to go
> and engage themselves, or perhaps even suggest things I could counter
> this negativity with.
>

The major rebuttal is the success stories for Smalltalk.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

>
> > Well, if you want to figure out whether your friend is right or wrong,
> you could try creating a non-trivial thing in Squeak. This involves getting
> to know the entire system, not just the Smalltalk language and standard
> library. You would have to figure out how Squeak's tools work and how to
> shorten the feedback cycle to the level you are most comfortable with. ---
> After that, you are qualified to ponder about what modern Web browsers (+
> DOM/CSS/JavaScript) have achieved yet, and what they still miss. Maybe also
> include the motivation behind Docker and containerization in general.
> >
> > Just kidding. :-) Or am I?
>
> "Go and see for yourself" is sadly a very common rejoinder when asking
> programmers for information about programming languages, but it is
> pretty much never a helpful one. :-(
>
>
> --
> Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
> Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
> UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
>
>

-- 
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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