PaulMorrison

Paul Morrison was educated at Eton and studied social anthropology at Cambridge, but was attracted to computers at an early age. He eventually worked for IBM for 33 years in 3 countries - initially in England and the US, but for most of his career with IBM, in Canada. He was one of the designers and builders of the Bank of Montreal's "Mech" on-line banking system, which is still going strong 30 years later. He reckons he has been active in the computer industry for 44 years!

His main claim to fame is that he stumbled on FlowBasedProgramming in the late 60s - early 70s, and has been exploring and trying to promote it ever since. He wrote a book describing his experience with this concept and its various implementations over a period of almost 30 years [ISBN 0-442-01771-5 (amazon.com, search)], and feels that the time is probably now right for this technology, as many people have now discovered for themselves the problems with (some aspects of) OO, and the industry is moving towards more and more complex networks of systems, and ever more complex computer architectures, many of which resemble the network-oriented nature of Flow-Based Programming.

Paul is now an independent contractor, maintaining legacy mainframe systems. His favorite programming language is IBM S/390 (now Z/90) High Level Assembler Language, mainly because of its extremely powerful macro facility, but also its incredible longevity (he reckons he has been using it for almost 40 years). However, he has also coded in PL/I, COBOL, APL, REXX and a large number of other IBM Assemblers. He can also get by in C++ and Java. However, he stresses that programmers should not be coding, they should be combining prewritten components. Rather than measuring programmer productivity by the amount of code they write, they should be measured by the amount of new function they produce minus the amount of new code they generate! Paul has always done his own research in parallel with his official (paid) work, and hopes to one day find some like-minded people to join him in the research described in this wiki and his web site (http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/).