PURE + Alloy

Introduction

What came first, the chicken or the egg? It is difficult to tell with PURE+Alloy. PURE is a modeling language inspired by the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and UML, Alloy is the front end to create PURE models and much more.

I was at a demo of this system organized by FINOS at Goldman Sachs on the 19th of December 2019. The demo and associated talk was given by Pierre de Belen, MD Technology, Goldman Sachs. Pierre is the godfather of PURE+Alloy. The demo was held on the 47th floor of the Goldman Sachs headquarters, I had to fight to concentrate on the demo as the view from the conference room was quite fascinating; the Hudson river, the boat traffic and a view of the large buildings on the Jersey City shoreline, all familiar to me from the long years in New York City, but from a totally different perspective. This is the same feeling I had about PURE+Alloy.

As a developer of financial infrastructure and associated technology for more than 30 years, I have been hearing about the demise of programming as a profession with many announcements of Business Process Modeling Software and code generation over the years. Many of those tools could model processes and data and generate code; but manual modification of code often uncoupled the generated code from the model and turned it into a mess. However with PURE+Alloy I saw that this field was maturing, as discussed below. This might not put programmers out of business, these solutions will expand their tool-chest and make them more productive.