I've always known your world is complex, working closely with accountants and actuaries the last 4 years doing data applications further confirmed that, there's some legitimately complex math that shows up, and it's a lot of work to model that correctly.

"It's just a ..." Is a redflag to me, project's going to be a gongshow.

I find that mentality of not trying to understand the problem and its context totally counter to the engineering method.

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.

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.

Yeah, I've cleaned up the messes that idiots like that have left.

Yeah, the "It's just a..." guy collapses into a fetal-position sobbing heap when you start looking at exception flows, rollbacks, compensating transations, and all the tweaks and tweezes that every workable real accounting system (or any other complex workflow) has.

risking guaranteeing

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.

Tcl's small but, in its own weird way, almost perfectly formed. Seeing it mentioned after all those decades raised a smile.

Agreed. But those that do know COBOL make BANK maintaining the old financial systems!

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.

Is it a “risk” if it’s the desired outcome?

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.

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.

I’d think they’d put the commits onto the blockchain.

Hey asshole - it works - don't fix it.

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.

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?

Bring back lotus notes and the command line!

Well you need static types I assume, for code safety and all that.

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.