Register today so you can come to the great talks we have lined up this year - and make a vacation out of it, since we'll be in sunny Orlando, FL:

Number Crunching Smalltalk

experience report

Poon, Dan: Romax Technology Ltd.

Monday 2 pm to 2:45 pm

Abstract: For over 10 years, Romax Technology Ltd. have pioneered the use of Smalltalk in Engineering Design and Analysis, a numerically intensive domain and traditionally the preserve of FORTRAN and more recently C and Matlab. Many vehicles on the roads today have benefited from Smalltalk analysis.

Smalltalk was initially used for product modelling and visualisation - its uses now includes number crunching where it performs along side FORTRAN.

Smalltalk's USP is that it is such a simple language that, when supported with pair programming between numerical analysts and Smalltalk coaches, it quickly becomes a lingua franca, enabling esoteric numerical algorithms and domain knowledge to be melded with production software skills.

Once captured in Smalltalk, a numerical model is much more malleable than its FORTRAN counterpart, meaning we can easy parameterise the model and apply optimisation techniques such as genetic algorithms.

We will also discuss the political implications of getting engineering analysts and computer scientists to work in pairs, the strong business case for doing so, and how our org chart has evolved with it.

Bio: 16 years of OO development experience from the early days of version 1.0 C++ to OODBMS. From the early attempts at OO methodologies to Agile. Worked within Telecommunications, Foreign Exchange Options Trading, and now Engineering Design Analysis.

See you in Orlando!