5 ms·
7 Person Year Application Rewritten in 2 Person Months
A lone programmer rewrites an entire project in 2 months. It uses executable specifications. It is thrown away because nobody else understands it. (LISP, YACC. or something else?)
- startupcrazy 19y agoExecutable 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!
- andreyf 19y agoSounds like a prisoner's dilemma kind of problem... individual firms won't benefit from open sourcing unless everyone open sources.
- brlewis 19y agoNot at all. Open sourcing your software not only means you share the benefits, but also the costs: http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/buybuild.html http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/buybuild.html
- startupcrazy 19y agoIndeed. All of the Detroit automobile companies are now off shoring to India and China to try to reduce costs. Open sourcing factor floor control and monitoring systems is simply another way to achieve the same results.
- mynameishere 19y agoI thought for sure this would mention another "innovation" that came out of Chrysler, "Extreme Programming": http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationSuccess http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationS... 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.
- startupcrazy 19y agoTwo of my developers were on the original XP team at Chrysler. They don't to XP at Chrysler anymore either.
- ratsbane 19y agoThis 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.
- axiom 19y agoHe's talking about SCADA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA) 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.) So he's not kidding, this is a BIG deal.
- imsteve 19y agoI hate, no I HATE that language...
- edw519 19y agoActually, this writer's conclusion, open source, is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I believe, and what I think is the premise of this forum. 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.
- ratsbane 19y ago"Good! Another opportunity for a couple of hackers in a spare bedroom." Right-O.
- startupcrazy 19y agoAgreed. The problem is, hackers don't tend to even have access to this type of problem because you need access to the very real environment of a large factory floor. And, even if you did build a better solution, there are relatively few customers, so selling is really about selling into large corporate bureaucracies, not getting someone to download a cool new plug-in. This type of selling is very expensive, and they will not buy from a couple of hackers in a spare beadroom
- edw519 19y agoRight. Now, change "billion" to "million". Find a little work in one of the thousands of small businesses in your neighborhood, and within 2 weeks you'll find yourself screaming one of two things, either, "Who wrote this &^#$^#&!" or "I can do way better than this." Congratulations. You just found the basis for a viable start-up.
- startupcrazy 19y agoThat I can do!
- edw519 19y agoThose 4 words still send chills up my spine, especially with the exclamation point. (I know, what a nerd.) Hate to get all Oprah on you, but sometimes I think having that attitude is half the battle.
- mpfefferle 19y agoAnyone have any idea what this consultant might have been doing to get this kind of productivity?
- SwellJoe 19y agoAs far as I can tell from the article: Magic. Or, maybe he called it "agile", but I'm not really thinking gymnasts and ballerinas are magically great developers, though they are strikingly agile. This article needs some kind of detail--it doesn't answer most of the W's of good journalism: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. We've only got a really vague what ("a good developer built something that I liked a lot") and a vague where (Chrysler). Somehow all of the good bits are completely left out.
- startupcrazy 19y agoYes. You have run into the nature of a non-disclosure agreement the big three have everyone sign. You cannot tell the good parts.
- SwellJoe 19y agoBut, that means you don't have a story. You strung me along expecting a payoff, and there was none. It's more than a bit rude. ;-)
- startupcrazy 19y agoI told you too much already. :-) Several clever grammars were written. If you want any more, you have to buy Chrysler.
- nostrademons 19y agoNowadays, that doesn't seem all that hard... ;-)
- SwellJoe 19y ago
- rwebb 19y agoUhh...where does the $50 billion come from again?
- axiom 19y agoTracking down-time means knowing where your bottlenecks are. If you know your bottlenecks are you can improve cycle time. Improving cycle time by just a few seconds mean massive increases in output. $50 billion might be a stretch, but it's not far off. Note: Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to produce a part. It's sort of like the MHz of the manufacturing world. Usually car plants are setup such that there are n manufacturing lines in operation at any given time producing/assembling parts. So you're always at the mercy of the slowest line. It takes months to comission a new line so it's not just a matter of "adding servers" to improve production.
- rwebb 19y agoThanks. I've read The Goal. My point is that Chrysler itself was recently sold for less than $10 billion. Maybe Cerberus bought because they knew about this code that was written in a day and now they are going to turn them into a $50 billion dollar software company? Look out SAP & Oracle...
- axiom 19y agoOk, well then your question is even easier to answer if you know that data tracking is serious business in manufacturing. From the article: "Did you know that there is an IT breakthrough hidden inside of Chrysler that in the right hands could be worth 50 billion dollars or more?" In other words all he's saying is exactly what I replied to your post: that data collection and tracking (not just for Crystler but as a standalone product) is worth a lot of money. He's not saying that Chrysler could or would sell this - in fact that's kind of the point of the post.
- rwebb 19y agoI see your point, but the title of the article is "Chrysler, Want To Make an Extra 50 Billion?" My point is that if it was written by some dude in a day, it's not going to make anyone $50 billion, especially Chrysler.
- jemptymethod 19y agogive me 2 months and I could do away with AOP by showing how (comparatively) trivial it is to implement in Lua
- almost 19y agoGiven enough incompetent developers or bad managers any project can be a "7 Person Year Application".
- trekker7 19y agoI was half expecting this to be a story about Lisp.
- startupcrazy 19y agoI was wondering when someone would finally make a comment about Lisp. In fact, this could very easily be a story about Lisp. Using Lisp to create grammars to read and execute specification files. This developer was forced by the client to write entirely in Java, but would probably have used Lex and Yacc, plus Java, if given a choice. I suspect, folks around here could get the exact same results in Lisp. The key is, Lisp programmers have likely been taught to think about the problem in a similar manner. The key is how you think about the problem, not the specific tools you use.
- rsheridan6 19y agoHow 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?