7 Person Year Application Rewritten in 2 Person Months

He's talking about SCADA (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA</a>)<p>Sounds really impressive. If anyone has ever worked with PLCs you know what a nightmare it is to interface with them and deal with their primitve data types. Not to mention programming them in ladder logic (yeah, most industrial machines are still programmed in ladder logic straight from the 1800s.)<p>So he's not kidding, this is a BIG deal.

I thought for sure this would mention another "innovation" that came out of Chrysler, "Extreme Programming":<p><a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationSuccess" rel="nofollow">http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationS...</a><p>Short story: Chrylser had been trying to unify its various systems and subsystems for payroll and had failed and failed. Eventually, a group of consultants were brought in who had invented a particular agile technique, extreme-programming. Of course, the project failed, but that didn't keep the consultants from spreading the XP word throughout the world.<p>

This sounds familiar. I went through something like this at a Fortune-100 company which I won't name here, except they rejected the solution because it wasn't written in .Net and budgeted around seven figures to rewrite their existing horrible system in .Net. I quit somewhere along the way but I still feel the frustration, pain, and perhaps even anger whenever I think of the stupidity and waste. I hope I never have to go through that again.

Executable specifications. The new compiler was about 5000 lines of Java. The developer says he can probably reduce most of 3000 lines of it to about 700 productions in YACC. Of course, nobody is interested!

Uhh...where does the $50 billion come from again?

Sounds like a prisoner's dilemma kind of problem... individual firms won't benefit from open sourcing unless everyone open sources.

Anyone have any idea what this consultant might have been doing to get this kind of productivity?

How would it benefit Chrysler to open the source? According to this article, their software gives them a competitive advantage. Why would they want to share it with other companies?<p>

I was half expecting this to be a story about Lisp.

Actually, this writer's conclusion, open source, is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I believe, and what I think is the premise of this forum.<p>Mega-institution isn't aware of its own golden needle in its haystack? Good! Another opportunity for a couple of hackers in a spare bedroom.<p>

Given enough incompetent developers or bad managers any project can be a "7 Person Year Application".

give me 2 months and I could do away with AOP by showing how (comparatively) trivial it is to implement in Lua