Who did that, exactly?
"• Violating the substitution principle. A procedure that worked with objects of a class no longer worked with objects of a subclass. As a result, many almost-identical procedures needed to be written.
"• Using subclasses to mask bugs. Instead of correcting bugs, subclasses were created to mask bugs, i.e., to test for and handle those cases where the bugs occurred. As a result, the class hierarchy was very deep, complicated, slow, and filled with bugs."
That's a good question. I can think of several candidates, but none that match the specific problems.
The AXE-N venture was to be the most expensive industrial project in Sweden after Saab’s JAS fighter. One calculation estimates that it cost Ericsson SEK 10 billion. The project has often been described as a total failure.
https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/changing-the-wo...
Swedish wikipedia has more information: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/AXE-N
Some people here might know Ellemtel from their C++ style guide, which was a byproduct of the AXE-N project. In Emacs "ellemtel" is one of the built in choices for CC Mode style.
There is a right time and place to use OO (and inheritance) and wrong places and times to use it, and it takes training AND experience to know the difference. Further, a lot of it depends on the language; some languages have poor OO models, forcing one to use lambda's etc. instead. In my opinion, a better OO language reduces the need to use lambdas. I know this is a controversial statement, but I stand by it.
Microsoft (Cairo) seems to fit the bill almost exactly, but it was only initiated in 1991.
Plus, the failure of Plan 9 was more an early 90s thing.
It's also extremely well-suited for very large teams and much harder to mess up projects in Ada than in many other languages.
Unless a survivor of the project can chime in, I'm going indulge in a little idle speculation and agree that defense sounds like a good candidate for losing a billion dollars. Maybe not DoD itself, but a big contractor?