Over on his Blog, Marten showcases a real world system written in Gemstone/S Smalltalk for collecting and predicting as well as reporting election results on German TV. The Backend system runs in Gemstone/S and has been in use for that purpose for several elections in German federal states for a few years already. So if you watch the special programs on German ARD or regional channels on election days to see the latest prognosis and detailed results, you see numbers collected and calculated on a nicely crafted Smalltalk system written by fine developers. As far as I know, Smalltalk has been in use for predessors of this system for quite a while.
I hope Marten will continue to write about the system in General and what they learn(ed) writing and running it. While the task may sound easy at first glance, imagine a major national public broadcasting station relies on your results on Sunday afternoon at 6pm for at least 3 hours for a live programme. And imagine a few hundred or thousand interviewers sending in results on a Sunday.
You may get a feeling of how much risk you want to take when developing and running such a system….
If you are interested in Smalltalk in General, or in Gemstone/S, I encourage you to visit and/or subscribe to Marten’s Blog.
Joachims Small World 