In prior posts I've discussed the nature of programming languages and their evolution. I have given an overview of the so-called advances in programming languages made in the last 50 years. Most recently I described a couple of major advances beyond the 3-GL's. The purpose of this post is to give a couple real-life examples of how amazing new 4-GL’s and O-O languages have worked out in practice.
I was CTO of a major credit card software company in the late 1990’s. Because of that I had a front-row seat in what turned out to be a rare clinical trial of the power and productivity of the two major new categories of programming languages that were supposed to transform the practice of programming. Of course no one, in academia or elsewhere, has written about this real-world clinical trial or any of the similar ones that have played out over the years.
Bank One and 4-GL's
Bank One, based in Columbus Ohio, was a major force among banks in the 1990’s. They were growing and projected a strong image of innovation. During the 1990’s the notion that applications should be based on a DBMS was becoming standard doctrine, and the companies that valued productivity over Computer Science (and internet) purity were united behind one form or another of 4-GL as the tool of choice to get things done. Together with Anderson Consulting, one of the giant consulting companies at the time, Bank One proceeded on a huge project to re-write all their credit card processing code into a 4-GL.
After spending well north of $50 million (I heard nearly $100 million) and taking over 3 years, the project was quietly shelved, though industry insiders all heard the basic story. No one had an explanation. 4-GL’s are amazing, so much better than ancient things like COBOL – and card processing is just simple arithmetic, right, with a bit of calculating interest charges thrown in. How hard could it be? Harder than a 4-GL wielded by a crack team of one of the country’s top tech consulting firms could pull off with years of time and a giant budget, I guess.
On top of everything else, they had a clear and unambiguous definition of what the 4-GL program needed to do in the form of the existing system. They had test cases and test data. This already eliminates a huge amount of work and uncertainty in building new software. Compared with most software projects, the work was simple: just do what the old program did, using existing data as the test case. This fact isolated the influences on the outcome so that the power and productivity of the 4-GL was the most important factor. Fail.
Word of this should have gotten out. There should have been headlines in industry publications. The burgeoning 4-GL industry should have been shattered. Computer Science professors who actually cared about real things should have swarmed all over and figured out what the inherent limitations of 4-GL's were, whether they could be fixed, or whether the whole idea was nothing but puffery and arm-waving. None of this happened. Do you need to know anything else to conclude that Computer Science is based on less rationality than Anna Wintour and Vogue?
Capital One and Java
Capital One was the card division of a full-service bank that was spun out in 1994, becoming an unusual bank whose only business was to issue credit cards. In just a couple years the internet boom started, and with it enthusiasm for the most prominent object-oriented language for the enterprise, java. Capital One management was driving change in the card world and presumably felt they needed a modern technology underpinning to do it fully. So they authorized a massive project to re-write their entire existing card software from COBOL to Java. I remember reading at the time that they expected incredible flexibility and the power to evolve their business rapidly from the unprecedented power of Java.
The project took a couple years and was funded to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars; the amounts were never made public. As time went on, we heard less about it. Then there was a small ceremony and the project was declared a success, a testimony to the forward-looking executive management and pioneering tech team at the company. Then silence. I poked around with industry friends and discovered that the code had indeed been put into production – but just in Canada, which was a new market for the company at the time, handling a tiny number of cards. Why? It didn’t have anywhere close to the features and processing power that the existing COBOL system had to handle the large US card base. Just couldn't do it and company management decided to stop throwing good money after bad.
Conclusion
Executives and tech teams at major corporations bought into the fantasy that the latest 4-GL's and O-O languages would transform the process of writing software. They put huge amounts of money with the best available teams to reap the benefit for their business. And they failed.
These projects and their horrible outcomes should have made headlines in industry publications and been seared in the minds of academics. Software experts should have changed their tune as a result, or found what went wrong and fixed it. None of this happened. It tells you all you need to know about the power and productivity gains delivered by 4-GL's and object-oriented languages. Nothing has changed in the roughly twenty years since these events took place except for further evidence for the same conclusion piling up and the never-ending ability of industry participants and gurus to ignore the evidence.
Can you provide a location to purchase all books relating to Ahriman?
Posted by: Joseph Brogan | 01/14/2021 at 07:18 PM