DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
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"risking"? No no no. "promising"
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Vibe Coding. I can't see a way for this to go wrong...
Nope. it won't go wrong. Do you know how I know? Because the faultless, ever-wonderful DOGE team is on it. They have never gone wrong. Ever.
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COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don't want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language's current standard dates to 2023.
It's at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you'll be a career bureaucrat but that's up sufficiently many people's alley, no "move fast and break things", it's "move slowly and keep things running".
Is that true everywhere or just in the US? I know that, at least a few years ago, a bunch of banking software in the US was still in COBOL but parts of Western Europe were modernizing their banking industry. I'm probably going back to school for computer science in the fall and had been considering trying to learn COBOL in my free time, or learning more Fortran (I have actually taken a programming class with Fortran, but because it was aimed at beginners it didn't really go in depth, but I bet it'd look good on certain resumes). It's looking like my future is in Europe somewhere, so I'm keeping that in the back of my mind while making decisions.
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You're thinking of discount Gene Hackman from Superman III: 2 bad 2 crazy
Right movie, wrong character. Gus Gorman, played by Richard Pryor, skimmed the money from discount Gene Hackman (Ross Webster, played by Robert Vaughn).
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Right movie, wrong character. Gus Gorman, played by Richard Pryor, skimmed the money from discount Gene Hackman (Ross Webster, played by Robert Vaughn).
No you're thinking of magneto
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Wont happen legacy systems more complicated than expected, well it wont happen functionally....
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if (!=white) {benefits=false}
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This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
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if (!=white) {benefits=false}
Nah I think it will just be
const benefits = false; -
Yet it's the thing every junior dev wants to do as they gain more experience.
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COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don't want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language's current standard dates to 2023.
It's at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you'll be a career bureaucrat but that's up sufficiently many people's alley, no "move fast and break things", it's "move slowly and keep things running".
The attractiveness of learning it was that you could avoid boom and bus cycles of retrenchment and clowns like Elon musk. Unfortunately that isn't true anymore so I think once the dust settles, finding people willing to specialize in tech like this is going to get real hard.
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Bold of you to assume they'll use Java and not some obscure language picked based on the need to pad their resumes.
We all know it's going to be nodejs, backed up by mongodb. This is because LOC on the commits can be maximized for minimal effort, and it will need to be rewritten every 2-3 years.
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What's "vibe programming"?
It's understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.
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There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:
- It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
- It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
But dude, bro, we could put the entire system on the blockchain man, and make it super efficient with an AI backend that will remove all errors bro.
Dude it's not even written in Rust bro. WTF is this dinosaur shit?
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Is that true everywhere or just in the US? I know that, at least a few years ago, a bunch of banking software in the US was still in COBOL but parts of Western Europe were modernizing their banking industry. I'm probably going back to school for computer science in the fall and had been considering trying to learn COBOL in my free time, or learning more Fortran (I have actually taken a programming class with Fortran, but because it was aimed at beginners it didn't really go in depth, but I bet it'd look good on certain resumes). It's looking like my future is in Europe somewhere, so I'm keeping that in the back of my mind while making decisions.
I'm not enough into that industry to actually give a good estimate, here, but the amount of COBOL systems still up and running is certainly not even close to non-zero, and it's going to stay that way for a while. From what I gather for companies moving away from COBOL is more of a "programmers are hard to find" situation, not "these systems absolutely must be replaced" one. It's well-supported and scaled with their business, as in, in places they're running the same 60 year old code on new mainframes because if there's one thing that IBM mainframes are then it's excessively backwards-compatible.
As far as the language is concerned: It's not hard, it's just weird, dating back from an age where people thought randomly calling things "divisions" would make businesspeople capable coders. The reason I'm not in that space isn't because of the language but because of the type of software you write there, it's all bookkeeping and representing business procedures, as said: Bureaucracy.
Also I'm not sure what "modernising" actually meant, there: SEPA instant payment was introduced, meaning that mainframes won't batch up the day's transactions and then talk to each other every night so cross-bank transfers took a day to process, now they're doing it in ten seconds. Most banks already supported instant transfers within their own systems so they should only have had to rewrite the external interface as the rest was already up to the task.
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This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.
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This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
I did such a thing, but I had a big advantage: the codebase had been done by people who had never really learned to code, and I was a seasoned programmer with 20 years of experience.
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Also : it's very complex and it happens to work fine for decades.
If one day i write a code project and manage to make it work without any major issues for several decades, there is no way i attemptto rewrite it.
Yeah, there's almost 100 years of law, case law and agency regulations built into how this software works. And they fired all the people that knew anything about it.
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Ah yes, a classic tale...
"We're going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we'll do it in a few months!"
So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There's are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.
I bet they'll do it in Waterfall too.
It's interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It's just fucking traffic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to do many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.
They're not going to use Java, it's going to be typescript.
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This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
I'm sure the doge boys are expert grock vibe coders, it will be fine, they've got big ballz on the team, what could possibly go wrong? /s
