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I had to port a real time OS IVR system to an emulation platform on WIN32 and reproducing the peculiarities and edge cases was 95% of the work. Painful.

They must be stopped. This would be catastrophic.

😡😡😡

I wrote COBOL for insurance applications for 12 years. If they think they need to and can do this rewrite they’re too stupid to pick out their own clothes.

plus you can’t talk about COBOL systems without talking about JCL, an entirely different language to control machine resources for the COBOL programs!

As a former IT QA professional ... so much this.

Will it be written using xAI?

"It’s harder to read code than to write it." Explains a lot

I did something better

I'll write a compiler for my new language!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4a...

Genius enough to completely and correctly rewrite social security in a few months. Not genius enough to learn COBOL or maintain the existing system. The paradox of rewrites.

It will be so good. ++ good, even.

The most important point is that legacy code bases grow eco systems around them. And they become interdependent in often undocumented ways (e.g., the monthly abend triggering a monthly job). So rewrite this singular thing ends up growing to, rewrite the entire world. It is a fools errand.

Back when programmers were programmers and not yet "engineers"

The riots by seniors who don’t get their SSI for a few months will be *epic*.

Creating a FuckedString class in my codebase tomorrow

"When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work...You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists." 👏👏 Excellent piece of tech writing.

They don't intend to write quality software that is effective at its job. They don't know how to do that, nor do they care to learn. This couldn't be done properly in 3 months with infinite resources.

I learned COBOL in high school. I graduated in 1985. It was based on conversationalist language. These DOGEy kids don’t ‘get’ that. One shitshow, coming UUUUPP!!!

I’m not a programmer, but that was a great read

sweet cheeses on a cracker, ELON IS AN IDIOT WHY WOULD WE EXPECT ANY DIFFERENT FROM HIS IDIOT INCEL TECHWANNABE'S??? thank you for further confirmation of what is abundantly obvious, but also my intuition, and apparently that of most humans. plus, he & his li'l gang are ugly. (i feel better now.)

I was put in charge of a large healthcare 'conversion' and yes, it was successful. It was Cobol. It took 2 yrs and it was 1/10 the code SSA has. Don't believe Melon, or the felon. It is not true.

And do it using AI, no less. It just occurred to me that computer science schools could teach COBOL and other legacy languages -- maybe even assembler -- the way classics departments teach Latin and ancient Greek.

Great article. But, of course, it’s different this time because of AI. 😉

Those of us who've spent time in the Agile salt mines have been able to buck this wisdom, but it doesn't come without some serious success conditions.

Unless your a 19 year old "genius" coder...oh wait...

A lot of us learned the hard way how good of advice that was

Doesn’t Douchebag want to see his payment system become the next big thing. Bet it is at the center of the the mess they will create.

If they intended any kind of serious effort here, they’d be talking methods, requirements, etc. the cowboy method is a guaranteed fail. They aren’t trying to rewrite it, they’re trying to sabotage it.

Unless you WANT to break it!

it's also a wonderful description of why everything these idiots are doing to the government is dumb. those departments and the work they do are a product of the experience and lessons this country has learned and applied

Reminds me of when Apple tried to rewrite Mac os in the 90s and failed. Instead they bought Next and recycled NextStep.

Spolsky's writing throughout his site still hits years later. I still use his hiring guide.

Seems like musk is just going to break everything and then run it on a private system/server like Yarvin intended. From “The End of Reality” by Jonathan Taplin:

Just popping in to say Spolsky theme is the best dark theme for vim or emacs

I've referenced this post a lot of times

It’s not a thing that’s possible to do, regardless of tooling

I don’t suppose we can ask for warrants just yet, but can someone please organize the lawsuit against these morons?

What an informative article! Thanks!

Most of their parents weren't born either. 1959

This still holds true. Unless there are extraordinary shifts around the product/market, it's just hubris to do this.

Sure.

I mean, maybe you want a mainframe expert on your team? Or is that asking too much?

(Many, if not most, of the large banks also use COBOL.)

I’ll bring my popcorn

And the code will be written to kick off half the people, watch.

Even among “modern” studies (mostly from consultants, not academics) the highest success estimate I’ve seen is ~30%. Most are much more pessimistic, with a mere 12–18% success rate. “Move fast and break [all the] things” indeed. The biggest failures cost *billions*.

PL/1. That's a name I haven't heard for a very long time. You looking for a maintenance engineer?

Punch cards were great, except if you made a mistake. Compiling whatever you were doing was a great opportunity to take a walk as well.

when I said I wanted a jobs program I didn't mean like this

Maybe the real lesson was the subsequent work on HTML5 that defined what exactly what browsers should do in such detail that further compatible ones could be written.

Or that the rise of blogs is what brought back the era of browser advancement

Ahem. It appears COBOL isn't a dead language after all. 🤓 www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-15-...

Non-techie in IT company here. Our guys actually did that. They rewrote the whole code base from the 70s (don't ask, financial sector, actual old mainframes and such). Took only 6 years, 500+ devs (800+ with all the support peeps like me around) and over 1 billion euro.

Excellent articles!

I mean maybe letting them rewrite it is a good plan then. Will keep them busy with an incredibly mundane and complex task for 4 years

Sometimes the code is actually mess, but even then, starting from scratch is almost always the wrong answer. Even messy code can be refactored into modernity, preserving the lessons that were learned in the prior code.

You MUST ALWAYS write for the reader. No clever tricks. I know that the maintenance engineer who is going to read this in a decade or so is a psychopath and knows where I live. It's likely going to be me. If you write it as clever as you can then by definition you are too stupid to debug it.

Reading code is harder than writing it: a truer word was never spoken.

Listen to Joel. And I’ve lived it.

Think that you're all just full of envy, that they are so good with computers.

Always parcel it out for system maintenance. I still think keeping it COBOL adds a layer of security.

Have you tried SonoPhone? UI is a bit archaic but at least everything works without lag or timeouts.

You “might” be able to rewrite that quickly (though doubtful) but it’s the rigorous testing that MUST be performed to ensure the new code works for all cases that takes a long long time.

Thank you! I worked 40 years on COBOL banking systems and I was physically ill when I read of DOGE’s plans to rewrite SSA’s system using AI. It is ludicrous, but not funny at all.

I've had this one bookmarked since it came out. From browser to browser, computer to computer, this one has followed me for 25 years. STILL worth a reread.

Generally in the software industry when we're replacing a critical service we usually run them both in parallel until the new one proves it's working properly. That DOGE isn't doing that shows that they're either clueless or they don't consider these services that millions depend on as critical.

See also: Winamp 3.

More good read on this is "The Mythical Man-Month" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myt...

Hmz, don't make me feel old ;)

Why are people still taking everything they say at face value? They are going to destroy it. Then they are going to loot the money. That's it. They'll lie the whole time, but at no point will they put any real work into rebuilding it.

I can read your last sentence in 2 ways, true or false, depending on what context I fill in. For anyone needing help with software rewrites, please see the below resource: mandau.co mandau.co/case_studies...

AI generated code is usually full of bugs if not completely nonsensical.. and no ones knows exactly how it works. Recipe for a conversion disaster

Sounds like better they should learn COBOL!

💯

I miss his blog posts. Made me a better leader.

Crushing pizza and Red Bulls gak'd up on yay while pulling consecutive all nighters is the consensus strategy for writing accurate, functional code that finds iterative solutions to avoid deep recursion induced stack overflow.

Here is a famous writing from someone who actually wrote hundreds of thousands lines of COBOL. These pimple faced kids would be hard pressed to UNDERSTAND let alone rewrite such a complicated system. Ask every major bank in the country who still are using COBOL and Mainframe systems.

Isn’t the big difference here that DOGE doesn’t care if they destroy the code? If social security is rendered unusable and inaccessible isn’t that still a win for them? People will be angry, but that doesn’t seem to be a consequence they care about

Netscape is my favorite example of this, and I refer to it often.

We live in the land of Dunning Kruger now. The land of unknown unknowns. The land of Overtheskis

huh, I guess it's a million little Chesterton fences

What better Beta test group than seniors? Without phone support. Yah. Someone needs fired.

Way over their skis is a new one for me. Must be an Olympic saying. 😁

so... what I'm hearing you tell me is that 19-29 year old dudebros aren't the end-all, be-all of technology? (and Elmo is too stupid to figure this out)

Unless you are the consultants on a retainer ….

My son did a rewrite of a DOT system. They ran the old and new systems in parallel to compare results. He had to track down every different result, identifying errors in both systems. A long, meticulous and laborious process.

They need to be stopped. RIGHT NOW

Elon knows nothing about code

This! This!! Our first reaction is biased toward a 'rational' criticism. But this missing the point, that every incompetent decision taken is a *feature*: it leads to constant state of chaos and fear. Failures will be use to blame 'the enemies within'. This is the little fascist playbook.

Oh fuck... I didn't think of that. Sounds terrifyingly possible.

But they weren’t even born 25 years ago!

Actually there is one instance I’ve encountered where this is a great idea, and that’s when it was only just written and is completely unfit for purpose!

I can’t read this right now, but I am very very excited to do so later. 😍

And “he’ll “ say “who knew it was so complicated “ Morons

Well, it seems logical that if they were to do it, they phase it in - set up program with a small subset and build from there. They have a grandiose idea of capabilities without knowing the system- taking lessons from EM - Mr. Don’t sink Tesla. Well, don’t sink Social Security!

One thing I've been wondering is how systems and data that DOGE has been monkeying with are backed up, and where the backups are, and who has control of them.

COBOL the computer language my engineer husband used in 1970. Same as my grandson not knowing what the pound sign # is. “Oh that’s the hashtag”. Huge generation gap.

Upgrading a system takes precision, planning, testing, data migration, training, strong execution strategy, problem solving team, closure procedures, ongoing support and change control strategy. Doesn't matter if you are using AI the steps are the same. You also need to care about the outcome.

they aren’t doing it to make things better. they’re doing it to kill people en mass.