I don't anything about smalltalk, but one issue that was highlighted at that time was the inability to scale the number of "objects" to the required numbers (I

I don't anything about smalltalk, but one issue that was highlighted at that time was the inability to scale the number of "objects" to the required numbers (I can't remember exact typology, sorry). They used one of the smalltalk provider at that time, and went way beyond the upper limit. That was the official story anyway. A lot of things were claimed when I worked there, a lot of it BS. The culture in banking was definitely not for me: generally fairly smart people, but very perverse culture. This was the only environment I ever worked where people who actually lie to my face to make sure I made mistake when coding and fail. Everything was custom, and sometimes that meant athena, sometimes that meant terrible systems such as a "distributed database" that was a single threaded wrapper on top of an C++ STL hashmap running on NFS. The guy behind it was reworking its own protocol based on UDP instead of TCP because said system was too slow... There was 0 abstraction, so if you wanted something such as EUR/USD pair, you had to ask the one guy who knew which id it was, so that you could get the data from in code. To this day I am convinced this was done on purpose for job security.