| | | The man of visions: life story of Breogán Gonda and GeneXus |
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| One of Uruguay’s leading weekly newspapers recently published the following interview telling of the passion for engineering of GeneXus’ co-creator, and the significance of this man’s experience for innovation in Uruguay. |
He assures that his passion for engineering could be traced back to his early childhood, when he ignored the meaning of the word. He was one of the first students attending the career of “computer engineering” at the university, the first of its kind in Uruguay. Breogán Gonda, the co-creator of GeneXus – a successful tool for software development sold in 60 countries – is a rare product of his time and place in history, and of the serene even when that implies contravening the overriding trend.
 Gonda at one of ARTECH’s locations: the @3 building in Zonamérica / Photograph by Lucía Seco
— Where is your family from?
—From the region of Galicia in Spain. I was named Breogán after the Galician patriarch. Like in many other families, our story relates to the Spanish Civil War. My parents were Republicans who migrated to Uruguay, where they settled for good.
— What is the origin of your inclination for computer science?
—At 5 years of age, still unaware of what it was all about, I already felt a strong passion for engineering. Shortly after entering the university I also started studying computer science. By the time I was in my third year I realized that I didn’t really want to be an industrial engineer because this was not the right country for it.
I pictured myself fixing machinery all life long. In 1967, Uruguay was at the lead of countries offering careers in computer science. By then I already had 7 years of informal experience in the area, and the opportunity was there to add the academic university component. Like many others, in 1975 I moved to Brazil. My experience there was of great significance. I had the chance to work with huge companies like those in the U.S. or Germany, except that these were right there, across the border.
— How did the University of the Republic come to be a pioneer in offering the career of computer engineering in Latin America?
—Initially, it was a career open to students from all schools, since the idea was that computer science was necessary for all activities. The Dean, Oscar Maggiolo, particularly supported my initiative, and the commitment was significant, as it implied the acquisition of a powerful and costly computer and the professional advice of the renowned Argentinean scientist Manuel
Sadosky.
— It could probably be said then, that there were several key moments when certain conditions from your environment, combined with your personal decisions, led you to where you are today: the Spanish Civil War was the reason for your coming to Uruguay, the vision they had at the University of the Republic for the early implementation of a career in computer science, and your own migration to Brazil, a gigantic testing field… What was it that led you to GeneXus?
—Until then, my activity was consulting for large systems with databases. In 1984, a huge Brazilian firm from the textile industry –with over 20 factories in the country– invited me to work for them. I always used to have a colleague in every company with whom we acted in combination. This time it was the company’s executive manager, who asked me to totally change the firm’s computer systems. He found it paradoxical that middle-rank employees had access to good information for decision making, while those in charge of big decisions that could make the company a success or a total failure would not have actual information to assist them in their decisions. “I want all systems to be based on a single corporate database, so we can have everything there, consistently, to be exploited and to allow obtaining all the information necessary”, he said to me. That was an enormous dream, and I could not believe I was getting the chance to make it true. We started working with two Uruguayan engineers. One of them was Nicolás Jodal, my business partner in Artech. After one week’s work, it was already clear to us that the problem ahead was greater than any other we had come upon before. Corporate systems were something about which a lot was written, but there wasn’t much actually done in that field.
Who, in a company of such magnitude, actually knows all data with the necessary objectivity and detail? Nobody. We later discovered that it was not so much a matter of the company’s size, because this happens in all companies. When there’s no good raw material, objective and with sufficient detail, results always turn out dreadful. Bigger problems imply worse distortions. It was then that we realized that we either came up with a way to obtain reliable knowledge or we were bound to fail.
— So, confirming the need to have “reliable knowledge” was, in the end, the reason for that executive manager to want to undergo the whole project.
—Exactly! Our problem was how to obtain such “reliable knowledge”. What we needed was a different paradigm. It’s like in the art discipline: when you look at cave paintings, you notice great distortions, like the two eyes on the same side of the face. The thing is that man knows an object and tries to represent it upon the knowledge he has about it. And then somebody said “I want to represent it exactly as I see it”, and perspectives were invented. In our case, we wondered: Where is the actual knowledge? And it was in the vision of every user, from the company’s executive manager to the newly-hired assistant. All their visions are good and valid.
Today, GeneXus has the input of visions and captures all the knowledge contained in those visions, to systematize into a base that automatically generates and maintains the database and the programs necessary.
— How would you describe GeneXus to a beginner?
—It is a program for making programs automatically. Systems are traditionally built through manual programming, which implies high costs for organizations, mainly measurable in money, time and errors. Anyway, the paradigm of “development based on manual programming” is, still in our days, the most common worldwide. With GeneXus we want to create a new paradigm for “describing instead of programming”. Instead of working on the low level (detailed programming of every function necessary), developers focus on getting to know the “business”, by taking what’s essential from the reality of clients in order to describe it in a simple manner. The rest is done automatically.
— But, at that time, GeneXus was still not real…
—That’s true. We still didn’t have it, but good ideas are good even when their implementation is still very primitive. We started with small tools to aid us in succeeding in the task we had been asked for.
— How did those small tools turn into a solid path to define a career?
—We considered those small things we had revealed as significant aspects that needed to be worked on further. Though we did not consider ourselves entrepreneurs at all! We were professional consultants and did not feel we were made for making money. Anyway, we decided to pursue what we had been working on with the idea of granting licenses of this technology to companies that could later make good use of it. So in 1985 we started our professional research activity. In order to do our research at ease the best place was Montevideo. One year after our return we already had important prototypes and we decided to travel to the U.S. to start to try our luck, and we were so naïve! How could a country like ours, with absolutely no tradition as to technological production, be the inventor of something that not even Americans would have thought of? They considered that something totally impossible.
From 1986 to 1988, despite our numerous attempts, all we had were failures, luckily for us. In 1988 we finally said: “Okay, we can either write a paper with all this and publish it, or we put together a company to sell the product”.
— GeneXus intended to change the way of thinking solutions… A very ambitious objective, don’t you think?
—Changing the paradigm is in a way wanting to change the world: something quite ambitious, but we had already proven it possible. Today, we have a community of over 60 thousand developers worldwide that build their professional life around GeneXus. Now, what does that represent in the computer science development all over the world? Very little. Paradigms are not easily changed. As Thomas Kuhn said: sometimes there is evidence that the old paradigm is no longer applicable but people who are into it cannot see that evidence. It is not even a matter of bad faith, they just don’t see it. But I think that this will change in a few years, because the need for creating systems is growing exponentially. Until 1994 we had totally structured systems that were foreseeable, where users not only did not make decisions but they were known and trainable. Those of us making decisions were in charge of making the systems. With the Internet now users are the whole universe and cannot be known beforehand, so they cannot be considered trainable. Therefore, in order to satisfy those users, besides intuitive and easy to use, systems need to be simpler from the user point of view. But also, the easier they are on the user end, the more complex they become at the other end, in addition to more expensive. The productivity of programming languages has been at a standstill for almost ten years now. So, on one hand we have an increasing curve of needs and on the other a straight line with the possibilities for that.
— So why hasn’t there been a collapse yet?
—Because ten years or so ago, the developed world said “let’s change the scale”. And instead of measuring costs in man-hours they started measuring money-wise. And the search begun for individuals who would work in exchange for one tenth of the salaries paid in developed countries. But even so, that exponential curve continues to rise. And the time will come when the paradigm will necessarily have to change because it will become unsustainable. Nevertheless, even when GeneXus has obtained an increase in productivity of 2 thousand percent, large corporations will not necessarily adopt it. In general, it is not colleagues that are most enthusiastic about our tool. It is appealing to those who are responsible for finding solutions to the problems. Some years ago, Bill Gates said that programming had no future, and that the world should start thinking about declarative ways. But that was something he said when he was retiring from Microsoft. Had that thought been made public ten years before, then Microsoft would have turned into a monstrous competitor, or into a great business partner to make provide credibility to this path.
See multimedia material in www.brecha.com.uy
* This interview, by María José Santacreu, was published in the supplement promoted and financed by the National Agency for Research and Innovation: ANII (Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación) of 26 March 2010.
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