Where is Smalltalk-80 best used?

Question

I want to know in which applications/programming domain are most suitable for Smalltalk. Could anyone please provide me some useful links that could answer my query?

Through googling I learned that some companies use it for:

• logistics and foreign trade application
• desktop, server and script development
• data processing and logistics, scripts and presentations

but I cant find documents/research papers that can tell me which programming domain Smalltalk-80 (or Smalltalk) is best suited.

Some of the programming domains are: - Artificial intelligence reasoning - General purpose applications - Financial time series analysis - Natural language processing - Relational database querying - Application scripting - Internet - Symbolic mathematics - Numerical mathematics - Statistical applications - Text processing - Matrix algorithms

I hope you guys can help me. I am doing this for my case study. Thanks in advance.

Ionization

cstheory.stackexchange.com and programmers.stackexchange.com might be better places to ask this question. – Retribution

How would cstheory possibly be a better fit? – Bloomers

Answer 1

It's a general purpose programming language. To paraphrase Kent Pitman on the question of what Common Lisp is useful for:

...Please don't assume [Smalltalk] is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list.

It's particularly suited for applications that cannot have downtime - it's quite normal to patch a running server in deep ways (say, by changing the shape of your class) without taking the server down - or systems that are very complex or have rapidly changing requirements.

Bloomers

Answer 2

Smalltalk has quite substantial growth recently in web based applications, thanks to innovations and fresh approaches in Aida/Web, Iliad and Seaside Smalltalk web frameworks.

In general Smalltalk is used for most complex information systems, let me mention just two:

• Finance: Kapital, a risk management in JP Morgan
• Manufacturing: ControlWorks, for chip manufacturing in AMD

Neuberger

Answer 3

My goal has been to do a brain dump into software. And I have found Smalltalk to be very well suited for that. Smalltalk makes it easy to put my ideas down in code. And it provides feedback to my thinking. The ability to debug infinitely deep at any point in the execution just enhances my understand of the problem to be solved. Then it allows me to carry out my solution most naturally.

Aik-Siong Koh

Clarindaclarine

Answer 4

I'm afraid you will get as many answers as users of Smalltalk. For some it's a "way of life" for others it's a learning process and in the end they "strand" at granddaddy of the OO languages. Some are using their smalltalk as a kind of shell to "IT-problems".

For me the answer is for application development. Now this is definitive a wide field. As you figured out it is used quite "much" in the software for economic stuff. And that is where I'm using it. I've decided to use it for my Web-Development projects which are related to "business".

Thoraco

Answer 5

The domains you named are all suitable for Smalltalk. Smalltalk shows its strengths in development for systems that are engineering-time limited, instead of hardware-limited.

The Seaside web framework allows us to create complex web applications in a fraction of the time needed in other technologies. The Gemstone object-oriented database allows us to nearly ignore persistence issues.

Highlands

Answer 6

Smalltalk is generally a very expressive, readable, and understandable language. Whenever a large codebase is to be maintained or code needs to be understandable to non-professionals, Smalltalk shines.

»Smalltalk is a vision of the computer as a medium of self expression. … A humanistic vision of the computer as something everyone could use and benefit from. If you are going to have a medium for self expression, programability is key because unless you can actually make the system behave as you want you are a slave to what’s on the machine. So it’s really vital, and so language comes to the for because it’s through language that you express yourself to the machine.« – Elliot Miranda

Graecoroman

Answer 7

You can check this link: http://www.clubsmalltalk.org/web/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=183&Itemid=117 this is a compilation of uses of smalltalk in latam.

Venter

Answer 8

perhaps another way of answering the question would be by stating what it might not be suitable for. One domain would be where you have "real" real time constraints i.e. you would need to control the garbage collector from kicking off. If I recall IBM's (OTI) Smalltalk embedded had a mechanism for turning off the gc, but IBM dropped that a while ago. The other domain I have not seen much of is cell phone apps. As far as I know none of the viable Smalltalk's can run on Android but that may change. One hears of folks in Squeak/Pharo working on that. I would love to see ST running well on Android. I think that the Android tablet market will be a hot one.

I should conclude by saying that in all the years I have been coding in ST i.e. since 94, I have seen Smalltalk in just about everything else.

Devoirs

There's no reason Squeak doesn't run on Android and iOS, other than licensing and porting time available. The current smartphones have plenty of power, and Squeak handles multi-touch. – Highlands

Squeak runs on both: Andreas Raab ported it to the Android, and John McIntosh to the latter. Bert Freudenberg got multitouch working on the iPad. – Bloomers

Answer 9

I cant find documents/research papers that can tell me which programming domain Smalltalk-80 (or Smalltalk) is best suited.

This is because Smalltalk is not a domain-specific language, but a general purpose language.

Things it has been used for in the past:
- as the operating system system language for personal computers
- writing rich multimedia and near real-time applications, such as sound synthesisers
- very large corporate and government data processing systems, such as the UK's Home Office Large Matter Enquiry System, or many of JPMorgan Chase's financial trading systems
- web applications, such as DabbleDB
- creating complicated development tools, such as IBM's VisualAge IDE
- experimenting and prototyping applications in early-stage development

Generally speaking Smalltalk shines where the systems are complex, development speed is a key factor, and maintainability is going to be a key factor.

I use Smalltalk to create applications to control, manage and distribute multi-platform JavaScript webapps.

Isolationism