Is anyone still programming in ObjectStar (formerly known as Huron) [closed]

Question

Huron was a 4GL that originated in the IBM 360 mainframe world in the early 1990s, created and sold by the Amdahl Corporation. It had a proprietary interpreted language and database that people either loved or loathed, and its most notable features were its unusual Rules Language syntax, and its tight integration with its query language, where you had to code your own nested loops to effect a Join.

With the appropriate use of indirection (such as its archetypal 'CALL TABLE.RULE') it was possible to quickly create exceedingly compact, elegant and extensible solutions. It was also possible, in the wrong hands, to create nightmarish unmaintainable monstrosities that sadly proliferated, and did nothing for its reputation.

It was renamed and rebranded as ObjectStar in the mid 1990s, ported to Unix and Windows NT, and given a UI component with which it was possible to create event-driven client-server applications that would run without modification on Windows or Unix.

It never really gained the critical mass needed to become a top-tier development tool, and around the turn of the millennium it was pretty much fizzling out.

In retrospect, it's something of a historical aberration; hence my question:

Is anyone still using it?

Or has even heard of it?

Answer 1

I don’t know what possessed me to do a global-search on ObjectStar, but when this page popped up with a relatively recent timestamp, I had to have a read! It was a pleasant surprise to see updates from so many ex-colleagues talking about the good times.

I was one of the earlier attendees of Dave’s courses back in 1991, and Huron/ObjectStar provided my bread and butter from then on for 15 years. It’s a shame the product never got to critical mass, it suffered the double whammy of plummeting interest in mainframes (weren’t they supposed to be obsolete by now?) and increasing interest in Buy-Not-Build over Do-It-Yourself. Its availability on other platforms helped a bit, but there was just too much established competition out there.

I suppose if I did develop a specialisation, it was latterly in Performance Analysis and Tuning, borne out of the discovery that if I put in some effort to locate badly-executing code, fixing it was often trivial and the CPU savings phenomenal. I’ll always remember my record was a 99.95% CPU reduction in a long-running job from a single-line code change, but savings of over 90% were not unusual. It was hard but thrilling work, a nice change from the relatively straightforward day-to-day SysAdmin tasks for which I was actually employed.

Gratitude comes in many shapes and sizes - I was shown the door in 2006, and I have been coding IF statements ever since. However, there’s not a week that goes by where I don’t wish I still had access to a Workbench for one reason or another. It was simply the best environment for doing any sort of adhoc data analysis I have ever used. It’s a shame I’ve had to mothball all the knowledge and experience I’d built up over the years, but I guess that’s progress …

So, for those of you still working with it, you have my envy, make sure you make the most of it!

Regards & Best Wishes to All, Raj

Answer 2

I know of at least two companies in Belgium who are still using it. It is now owned by TIBCO and is called Object Service Broker