Hacker News Reader

Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

My dad uses and has used BASIC.

He's not a teacher, nor a hobbyist.

He writes bank software. In BASIC. For forty years. At the same company. UBS, Bank of China, and other names all run this massive million(s)-line BASIC codebase, that he almost singlehandedly wrote, on minicomputers[1] powered by OpenVMS. With it, according to my father, they process billion dollars worth of transactions and other facets of their business. Every day. Surprisingly for enterprise software, his customers love it. They are only being forced to move to a completely new system since HP went and deprecated their entire minicomputer line.

Given this and other parts of the story-- perhaps better saved for a blog post-- I've always seen him as my 10x engineer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer, just so we're all on the same page.

View on HN

> perhaps better saved for a blog post

Please do write it, and submit it to HN! This is the sort of material nearly all of us would love to read.

It'd certainly be interesting to relate a multi-decade software project from the outside :-)

I will have to talk to my father about this... and explain why folks on the internet must hear his stories.

In the interim, would anyone happen to have an example of a good secondhand account of a software project? A basis or, at the least, an inspiration for how to proceed.

Joe Armstrong's paper on the history of Erlang (of which he was one of the authors) is superb (though it's less about corporate culture than about the language): http://cobweb.cs.uga.edu/~maria/classes/4500-Spring-2010/pap...

There's The Mythical Man-Month: http://www.amazon.com/The-Mythical-Man-Month-Engineering-Ann...

Showstopper, the book about the development of Windows NT, is great: http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Micr...

Thank you kindly. I knew about the mythical month, but the others are completely new to me.

My example is not explicitly software-related, but it's very very close.

https://www.reddit.com/user/36055512/submitted

Start oldest first, bottom of the list, and go upwards for chronological order (identical titles are to different subs, so only comments will be different).

Last I heard a book was in the works. I'm not yet sure if it's surfaced yet, but these posts make for a good few hours' reading. They're great.

The secondary suggestion here is that finding a forum that will appreciate the posts and give feedback - note the upvotes and sheer quantity of gold - can be incredibly encouraging. This format also benefits from the fact that there are so many posts on a daily basis all the readers have plenty to keep busy with while they wait, so each writer can establish a lazy pace of writing and submitting that isn't pressured or hectic.

As for continued inspiration, https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport features some great technical writing. Sort by top/week or top/month to find quality examples and the latest top authors (top/all is also awesome, but changes there are months apart) - just try not to drown in the firehose of cringe-inducing idiocy reporting! xD

The idea here would be that the subreddit's sentiment is grokked, inspiration happens, and a new writer appears :D

(Stop by Reddit's TOS and overview, and do NOT skip installing Reddit Enhancement Suite if you decide you like this particular site.)

Wherever the content ends up - a subreddit like TFTS, another messageboard or forum, or a blog - definitely please do link it. :D

Thank you & any technical blog post I write will certainly get submitted through here!

Not just a software project. More of hardware. But a good read, IMO:

The Soul of A New Machine

by Tracy Kidder.

About the race to build a new minicomputer, by a team at Data General.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

Prize winning book.

This is actually my favorite engineering book of all time.

Excellent to bring up!

Cool. My favorite part of the book is this:

[ Many of the engineers state that, "They don't work for the money", meaning they work for the challenge of inventing and creating. The motivational system is akin to the game of pinball, the analogy being that if you win this round, you get to play the game again; that is, build the next generation of computers. ]

That rewrite sounds like a great project to pair with junior developers on.

It has all of the optimal features:

1) You pretty much have to TDD, but it isn't hard to because you can start by writing tests that the old software passes as your "spec".

2) It actually matters if it works. As a junior dev, one of the hardest parts about giving a shit was that the tasks I was given often didn't matter.

The quality of my code when I was younger scaled exponentially with the challenge and meaningfulness. As is true with many immature youths, I only acted like it mattered when it mattered.

3) A senior engineer would likely enjoy refactoring/rewriting something like this. Focus on getting it right, take time to craft elegant solutions, etc. Plus you get to teach someone

4) Large company with resources and domain to take a long-term outlook on the problem. UBS isn't going anywhere (I hope), so they are incentivized to take longer to write a solution that lasts another few decades. They can also take the time to train a junior developer without worrying that they'll miss their metrics for the next funding round.

Honestly it sounds like a blast. Sign me up!

All excellent points; I don't disagree with anything except for the last one.

> Large company with resources and domain to take a long-term outlook on the problem.

My father works for company X that sold this system to banks; UBS and the other big ones didn't have a hand in the development other than testing and specifications.

Additionally, company X and their clients suffer from enterprise-levels of political dysfunction and mismanagement, e.g., "let's fire our internal QA team and replace them with underpaid contractors from <insert third world country>. what could go wrong?", "the new system being developed by our new college hire employees in <another insert third world country> is 10 times slower than the old one? Well we'll just run it on 10 times more expensive hardware!"

I could go on and on about the general shortsightedness, perhaps in a blog post[1]. Suffice it is to say: probably not the best idea to get signed on at the moment :-)

[1] The perhaps is saving me from commitment.

To elaborate a bit further, I feel like the best way of stating it is that in large organizations changing or allocating resources to anything (no matter how obvious) needs a sponsor in the form of a person.

That sponsor typically signs on because they really believe thing needs to get done and/or expect that if thing succeeds then they will look good.

Rewriting working code is a hard project to find a sponsor for, unless you're lucky to have software engineers high up in the hierarchy with clout.

I assume the original system is Business BASIC or something like it. I used that in one of my first dev jobs in the 1990s at an investment bank. All their internal systems were written in Business BASIC. They had moved off of the original vendor's hardware and were running it on PA-RISC HPUX servers.

Anyway -- the problem with developing tests for the old software is that there is no unit testing framework. You'd have to develop that too and unless you really invested in it you would not have stats like code coverage. Mocking out parts of the system would likely also be difficult because the code in such systems is normally spaghetti and not well abstracted.

If you're lucky they have some standard test data that can be used to run through system tests -- but that's at a much higher level than TDD would ideally want. And I know the shop I worked at had nothing like that back in the day. Everything was tested by hand.

Vms basic, most likely.

Main problem is not the lack of frameworks, it's a whole different culture of how to test...

Unfortunately, for the banks, they've not managed to maintain their withering infrastructure for a lot of reasons, and are just now realizing the threath from 'Fintechs' that are run by people that actually understands software development.

Not a surprise. There's a lot of that stuff around, on OpenVMS. There are new systems — yes, using BASIC on OpenVMS — being installed, too.

There are new Itanium servers with support added last year, another (final) generation is planned, and — in preparation for the end of Itanium — an OpenVMS port to x86-64 is presently underway, and there's a new OpenVMS release (for Itanium) is scheduled to arrive this March.

https://vmssoftware.com/products.html

I was an OpenVMS sysadmin and C/COBOL/BASIC programmer writing code for mostly storing tons of data and sending it off to other places. Hopefully though, now that HP spun off the VMS engineering team and the talk of an amd64 port coming in 9 they won't have to move.

"He writes bank software. In BASIC. For forty years. At the same company"

I would have gone insane :)

He didn't say his father was still sane ;-)

True... No disrespect, but I wouldn't be surprised if the company hasn't actually existed for 20 years already ;))

I had a good laugh at your comment and the parent's because I think I've said "I would have gone insane.", or "Are you insane?" to him more than a few times.

And yet he's more sane than me. He's a funny fellow.

Man, someone should just build an open source clone of HP's platform and keep the dream alive.

If only there were a drifting entrepreneur nearby interested in a doting customer base of Swiss banks wrapped up in a bow....

There are some products that can generate c++ from vms basic and implements a vms-like runtime on linux...

My TI 89 runs BASIC.

...but it also gives me access to great symbolic manipulation tools, which more than makes up for it.

Write a compiler for this dialect of BASIC for Linux.

What dialect of BASIC?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com