DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
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Musk would probably think that's just fine.
Server-side javascript is an abomination, but there's more of it around than you might think.
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riskingguaranteeingIs it a “risk” if it’s the desired outcome?
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It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
There are no such systems. What instead happens is that the surrounding business process gets distorted to work around the unfixed major bugs. And then, everyone involved retires and nobody knows anymore why things are done that way.
I know devs like everything to be perfect, but if your business can work around it for 15 years without fixing the bug or replacing the system, I dare say it doesn’t qualify as a major bug.
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COBOL is perfectly suitable for financial purposes for which it was designed.
Nobody uses COBOL for greenfield projects, even in the banking and financial sectors. And, as people with COBOL expertise die of old age, it becomes increasingly unmaintainable.
I bet is cheaper to teach it to new programmers than to rewrite old software. Just because a language is old doesn’t mean it is unlearnable or that software written in it needs to be rewritten.
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I bet they'll do it in Waterfall too.
Nah B. This will be Extreme Agile XP with testing exclusively in Prod. Xitter will be the code repository.
I’d think they’d put the commits onto the blockchain.
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Hey asshole - it works - don't fix it.
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Non programmer but skilled with computers type guy here: what makes Java well suited for this?
This is probably an incorrect prejudice of mine, but I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster. Didn’t people used to rip on Java for being inefficient and too abstracted?
Last language I had any experience with was C++ in high school programming class in the early 2000s, so I’m very ignorant of anything modern.
I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster
They're neither necessarily simpler nor faster.
COBOL is simple, but outside its sweet spot, it can't do much. That sweet spot is high volumes of relatively trivial calculations, coded by non-superstar coders. It's moderately efficient because it doesn't do all that much.
Of the oldest languages still in use, FORTRAN has gone through a few generations of incremental improvements, and for complex mathematical calculations, it can be faster than shit off a hot shovel. But again, it's limited in scope, its data typing is lousy, its general-purpose programming capabilities are poor, and any integration you do with other systems is going to be a vision of hell. I still deal with a FORTRAN codebase on my job, there are some situations where it's still one of the least-bad options.
Then, the last of the surviving languages of that vintage is Lisp. It can be insanely fast, but despite its simple syntax and semantics, nobody would call Lisp programming simple. Accounting-system coders would recoil in horror.
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Java can be pretty damn efficient for long running processes because it optimizes at runtime. It also can use new hardware features (like cpu instructions) without having to compile for specific platforms so in practice it gets a boost there. Honestly, the worst thing about Java is the weird corporate ecosystem that produces factoryfactory and other overengineered esoteric weirdness. It can also do FFI with anything that can bind via c ABI so if some part of the program needed some hand optimized code like something from BLAS it could be done that way.
All that to say it doesn't matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.
Yeah, Java can run maybe half as fast as equivalently complex C, while being far more maintainable. But to see that kind of performance, you'll want to use POJOs (plain old Java objects), not that enterprise bullshit. And there are many other optimization techniques that your average Java coder wouldn't see in their average coding job.
All that to say it doesn’t matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.
Schdule-driven development by people with no domain knowledge, with poorly understood requirements and life-and-limb-critical outcomes, led by an unpredictable moron. What could go wrong?
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Hey asshole - it works - don't fix it.
Bring back lotus notes and the command line!
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Node.js is a fantastic tool for web servers. Its event loop allows it to rival much lower-level languages in performance while remaining easy to write and maintain. JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for nearly a decade.
Well you need static types I assume, for code safety and all that.
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I'm sure having a corrupt non-government narcissist rewrite the code for SS will be fine. It's not like he could leave any code hidden in there for his own purposes, like controlling or redirecting payments or anything.
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Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
Made by IBM. We chose one of the worst company to do it.
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COBOL is perfectly suitable for financial purposes for which it was designed. The SSA code has gone through decades worth of changes and improvements that cannot be replicated even in 10 years.
This is considered usable in 2025?
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This is considered usable in 2025?
The code is already in production, there is no point in rewriting it. It can be maintained for decades to come. New features can be implemented in other languages and over time.
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Do you have reason to think that? Organizations that use mainframes keep them up-to-date in my experience.
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Why is there a need to rewrite it at all? Is it because COBOL is basically ancient hieroglyphics to modern programmers thus making it hard to maintain or update?
COBOL code, like any code, was written to embody certain business processes, and also to work around the quirks and blind spots of COBOL. And the people who understood those business processes are likely to be dead by now, and any documentation they wrote might be current and correct, or it might not. And very few people under the age of 60 have ever used COBOL in anger. So any legacy replacement project is going to have to encompass a big reverse-engineering effort, including analysis of a code base nobody is familiar with.
I'm old. A friend of mine is a fair bit older, getting into his late 70s. He knows COBOL but his main area of expertise is OS services, database tuning and assembler on old IBM and Fujitsu iron. Those are critical to keeping those old systems running well. He works half-time, is booked over a year out, and has a jaw-dropping daily rate. He also has a rider: one provision is that they have to tell him where he can smoke on-site, and if the answer is "nowhere," the deal is off. Also, he won't schedule any work that conficts with Burning Man, and he looks like a homeless guy. I brought him in on a consulting gig once. He did his bit, including an amazingly effective presentation to the C-levels (despite his profoundly non-executive appearance), and went his merry way. Saved us a fortune. You need people like that in order to have even a remote chance of success, and they're becoming exceedingly rare. Musk and his kiddies don't even know what they don't know.
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I've worked on teams converting legacy code for most of my life. The planning for something like this would take longer than six months.
If this proceeds in Trump's corrupt government, Elon will get the contact, will claim it is too broken to salvage, and will privatize it. The only way this goes anywhere is if Trump and musk stand to gain money, and they stand to gain a lot.
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Yet it's the thing every junior dev wants to do as they gain more experience.
Right after they write yet another content management system.
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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".
Well, the other thing about COBOL is that most people would regard it as a living death to have to deal with it as a day job.
And I've had interactions with offshore COBOL shops. The ones I worked with were not at all good. You'll never get 99th-percentile coders to work in that language, unless their only motivation is money.
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"ROFL"
Signed, everyone who has been involved in migrating a codebase before.
