On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:
Hi,
We are very happy to make the following announcement:
Lam Research, a leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry, is an experienced user of the Smalltalk programming language. Smalltalk is a key component in Lam's software control system for a broad range of the equipment it manufactures. Tudor Girba is a leading member of the tools and environment development effort in Pharo, having architected the Glamorous Toolkit for live programming. Eliot Miranda is author of the Cog virtual machine that underlies Pharo and other Smalltalk dialects.
Lam has engaged Tudor and Eliot to explore potential enhancements in Lam's use of Smalltalk. These enhancements range from running highly optimized Smalltalk on low cost, single board computers to enhancing Lam's Smalltalk development practices with state-of-the-art live programming. During the engagement, Tudor and Eliot successfully moved a key communication component of the control system to Pharo. It was a challenging task aimed at extending the reach of Lamâs system to the Pharo world including the option of executing on ARM processors.
Cheers, Tudor Girba, Eliot Miranda and Chris Thorgrimsson
Great to hear of this - particularly since I guess some(much?) of it was dealing with proprietary systems. I'll understand if you can't answer the following questions in detail. I'm interested in: * what model was the single board computers? Or what were its specs/price? Or how much of your experience might carry over to a board like the BeagleBone Black, particularly wrt to embedded control via it Programmable Real-time Unit. * did the communication component involve a proprietary protocol? Or one of the industry standard "process automation" protocols listed here[1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automation_protocols cheers -ben