Marie A. Lenzi, in an editorial for "Doc" (which I picked up at OOPSLA
97), writing about Java, said

Another dangerous little bit of goings-on is this "we wrote the
product in Java in three months" syndrome. This was a pretty
hefty piece of technology - how was this possible? Then you
realize that it was a rewrite of an already deployed applica-
tion. The requirements were already defined, it was already
designed, architected, tested, documented, etc. All the
painstaking work involved in the development process had
already been done. All they did was reimplemented in Java.
  Now, if this was originally a true object-oriented product,
written in say, Smalltalk, maybe C++ or Ada, for example,
then it might be fine, however, the rewrite effort still was
horribly understated. If this was previously a significantly
sized procedural product, and they rewrote the beauty in 3
months - well, that's scary.


Gary

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Gary Kephart, Software Engineer  |  Investment Technology Group, Inc
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Disclaimer: these are my opinions, not ITG's.