It's understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.

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?

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.

Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.

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.

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.

They're not going to use Java, it's going to be typescript.

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

If Trump is smart, he'll let Musk do all the unpopular project 2025 stuff, then throw him in prison at the end and escape the blame personally. This way he gets to keep popularity with his base while telling his donors they got everything they asked for. It's what all dictators do, really.

That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system's evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.

I don't think Rust is a bad language for doing same things people do with C++, but with a smaller standard and less legacy.

But yep, that's the kind of people.

About dinosaur things - I've started learning Tcl/Tk and it's just wonderful.

DARVO is all you need to avoid blame. Deny. Reverse Victim and Offender. Incredibly effective either way everyone except the genuinely principled.

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.

Russia just wants musks boy toys to cripple the only checks and balances putin thinks he has.

The MuskRat should get Big Ballz and the boys to program a video game, so he can have a new revenue stream to replace Tesla when it goes bankrupt, which sure looks like the future of that company.

Rewrite it in Rust has gone too far

It's not a case of "seeing the code isn't perfect" but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.

I'm reminded of this shitshow:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation

Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.

I'm an accountant by trade, there's a classic "techbro does accounting" style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn't spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude "it's just a database with some rules".

step 1. rewrite into spaghetti code
step 2. nobody understands the new code, so the govt has contract elon musk for code maintenance forever
step 3. profit

Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

So the way things already were?