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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

it has a bit of a smalltalk flavor, where the runtime is a memory image, with objects and data in a giant jumble.

There's one smalltalk vendor whose main product is an object-oriented database that is also a smalltalk instance (and you use other smalltalks as IDEs to it).

GemStone/S

I had the exact same thought! A custom IDE with all the source stored in a database is extremely smalltalk, although here the source is stored in a shared DB (it seems), rather than a per-user DB as it is with a regular smalltalk image.

Back in the day, Morgan Stanley & JPMorgan & …, used ENVY/Developer — fine-grained Smalltalk config-map / sub-application / class / method configuration & version control in a central database.

"Mastering ENVY/Developer"

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

Some folk worked as "librarians" to promote code reuse across projects.

There was also a giant investment bank system written in Smalltalk, so that may be a direct influence:

http://www.esug.org/data/ESUG2004/ValueOfSmalltalk.pdf

Can anyone confirm whether JP Morgan were able to decommission Kapital when they went to Athena? I've seen so many cases in banks where the old system is still running years and years after it was 'replaced'. And Kapital was used in so many, different, parts of the business.

The answer is no. Kapital persisted past Athena for many years and was not (seriously) considered for shutdown

In that case, here's a glossy —

https://www.cincom.com/pdf/CS040819-1.pdf

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