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A comment on Object Oriented Programming Oversold (2001). Parent comment

Re:Object Oriented Programming Oversold (2001) by arethuza on Friday December 04, 2015 @08:00AM (#10676042)
A previous employer had an application that was very successful (from a business perspective) because it wasn't flexible - they did a lot of acquisitions (one a month at one stage) and if there were any questions around their internal systems they got this application inflicted on them. At first I was horrified (it was ancient, user hostile, completely inflexible) but I actually saw that it worked - the companies being acquired were all in the same industry and their core processes were all pretty much identical (even if the terminology was all different) - so they could all adapt to the new application and it actually ended up working pretty well.

More "modern" flexible applications ended up having multi-month/multi-year "implementation" phases as teams tried to change their new application to their existing processes when it was actually easier to standardise the processes around a fixed application.

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Re:Object Oriented Programming Oversold (2001) by jacquesm on Friday December 04, 2015 @08:26AM (#10676154)
Airline companies typically have ancient stuff running but from a productivity point of view that old stuff beats the 'new' stuff hands down. It just works, has 0 overhead in terms of eye candy and so on. Ok, you can't play minecraft or solitaire on those machines but that's probably a benefit.
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Re:Object Oriented Programming Oversold (2001) by mipmap04 on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:06AM (#10676665)
Also, on those old systems running IBM RPG and other "green-screen" UIs, it's really impressive how fast users can navigate the system via keyboard commands when they are forced to not have a mouse.
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Re:Object Oriented Programming Oversold (2001) by acveilleux on Friday December 04, 2015 @11:28AM (#10677231)
I remember working in a bank in late 90s and while GUI apps were starting to replace the 3270s, completely non-technical "lifers" had just fully assimilated the old mainframe app.

Getting an account balance for example was a "Question 8" if I remember right, that is, the PF8 key on the keyboard. Routine banking operations were maybe a couple dozen keystrokes and mostly all the same pattern but different function key with paper overlays taped to keyboards to "name" the PF keys.

It wasn't pretty and the learning slope was steep but the same people who wrote their emails in Lotus Notes in All Caps and scanned word doc printouts into new word docs had no problem memorizing all the obscure operations they had to do every day.

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Re:Object Oriented Programming Oversold (2001) by jacquesm on Friday December 04, 2015 @11:30AM (#10677250)
One person I knew had a particular system down so well that they could fill the type-ahead buffer for several screens ahead of the mainframes response, the screens flashed by too fast to read.
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