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?

"…but sir, we only know Node.js…"

I wish Java was declared deprecated back in 2017 when Kotlin was adopted for Android and supported by Spring. It was the only sensible way forward for JVM. Sure with containerization there's some debate for the necessity of JVM at all but its GC and runtime optimizations are nice.

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!