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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

I would have guessed Plan 9 just from the timing, but I'm not sure the failure there was due to the wrong use of inheritance.

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My guess would be Ada. "Billions of dollars" => Government/DoD is involved.

Highly unlikely. Ada has objected-oriented programming only since 1995 (in the form of tagged types).

It's also extremely well-suited for very large teams and much harder to mess up projects in Ada than in many other languages.

If ever a forum that could draw a comment from somebody involved, it's this one. I was hoping this was a well known catastrophe somebody could fill me in on, but it sounds like the failure wasn't widely reported. I did enjoy this article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_...

Unless a survivor of the project can chime in, I'm going indulge in a little idle speculation and agree that defense sounds like a good candidate for losing a billion dollars. Maybe not DoD itself, but a big contractor?

Almost certainly not Plan 9, because that was written in C. Also, there's no way they gave them a billion dollars for development of a research OS. :)

That most certainly wasn't the case. The source for Plan9 is pretty plainly not hierarchical OOP.

Plus, the failure of Plan 9 was more an early 90s thing.

And I suspect the budget never got near billions of dollars. Plan 9 was a research project.

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