Making Money with Smalltalk

Here's a great story about the JP Morgan Kapital application - Smalltalk is what powers it:

The story begins in the early 1990s, when JPMorgan first developed Kapital using the object-oriented language Smalltalk and a compatible database from GemStone Systems. "While the basics can be picked up in a couple of weeks, the system is rich and multifunctional," says Verdier. "And users really like its flexibility. The ease with which we can reuse components to model complex instruments ensures a rapid time to market."

Using Smalltalk enables developers to focus on the business problems, so technologists can later adopt different strategies for component implementation without changing the remaining source code, he says. Such flexibility and virtualization are essential since the business constantly needs to innovate. Pricing and risk models are increasingly sophisticated and therefore compute-intensive and some existing products will need to be processed for decades.

A large part of their success is simple: while their rivals wasted time and effort rewriting applications in order to be buzzword compliant, JPM kept producing results on proven technology.

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