JPMorgan have a fairly serious Smalltalk app http://www.cincom.com/pdf/CS040819-1.pdf

However, only one. Make of that what you will.

They only have on app because Smalltalk if agile enough they build everything they need into it as the need arises - and this has been maintained over many years.

Gemstone is not "using" Smalltalk. Gemstone "is-a" Smalltalk.

Here are commercial companies that believe in Pharo (in the money on the table way of measuring belief)

http://consortium.pharo.org/

Interesting. So am I right in assuming there are:

    - 9 bronze level (1k Euro/year)
    - 5 silver level (2k Euro/year)
    - 11 gold level (4k Euro/year)
    - 5 platinum level (8k Euro/year)

...members of the consortium (based on the color of the surround on the member label/icon)? So that would be ~103,000 Euro per year? Or is that signifying a one-time contribution (vs. recurring annual)? It doesn't look like there has been a consortium report published since 2015:

http://consortium.pharo.org/web/reports

...any ideas what that means? (i.e. they stopped publishing them for privacy reasons, the consortium no longer has meetings, the consortium is no longer active, etc.?) Any ideas on what projects they are currently funding, and how many man-hours of programmer time are being purchased for Pharo in 2018?

Its a recurring fee. Of course, its dependent on members feeling they are getting value for money and continuing each year. The platinum level was only recently created.

I don't know what it means that there is not later reports. The consortium is definitely active. It arose because open source software is about people scratching an itch, and often the focus is on the fun stuff and not on the boring, difficult, dirty engineering required to make a product reliable and successful (e.g. operating a CI infrastructure). Pharo arose out of INRIA[1], one of France's publicly funded national research institutes. But their mission and governance structure is not suited to managing non-research engineers dedicated to working on Pharo. So InriaSoft[2] was created to fork off its successful software into consortiums funding pure engineering work on the software as an ongoing concern. At the moment the consortium has one full-time engineer, but hope to get another in the next couple of years if the consortium continues the current growth rate.

AFAIK (I am not directly involved), the main efforts decided by consortium members were:

* Stabilizing 32-bit to 64-bit conversion for Pharo, utilizing and contributing to the OpenSmalltalk-VM project.

* Stablizing Iceberg as our Git/GUI interface

* Maintaining CI infrastructure

btw, There is also the Pharo Association with 82 individual members. [3]

[1] https://www.inria.fr/en/institute/inria-in-brief/inria-in-a-... [2] https://www.inria.fr/en/news/news-from-inria/launch-of-inria... [3] https://association.pharo.org/

I know of a number of smaller business that are "as a service" that are built using Smalltalk.

Way back in the day, "DabbleDB" was written in Smalltalk. (It was a Zenkit/Airtable type web app.)

If I remember right, they had a separate image per customer and it took a moment to bring up the VM if hadn't been to the site in a while.

Sadly they got acqu-hired by twitter - and judging by some (not bad, just in lack of enthusiasm) comments, I got a sense that they sold dabbledb at peak technical/architectural debt...

It's a bit sad, I appeared to be a Google sheets meets office 365 flows on steroids before either was any good:

https://youtu.be/6wZmYMWKLkY

(i think that's from 2006 or so, archive.org has more info, but it's a bit painful to navigate on mobile)

Avi Bryant comments on hn from time to time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avibryant

As I understand it, each customer got an image/vm - and data was just stored as Smalltalk objects. It'd been interesting to see where they might have gone if they coupled the dabbledb front end with gemstone/s.

Gemstone provides a database. There are very large Smalltalk based applications that run using Gemstone as the backing database[1] . These applications are, for the most part, very large in-house applications that don't have much external visibility.

[1] http://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/docs/OOCL_SuccessStory.pdf