Technology

AI is going to write it.

Yep, months is a joke, doubly so when talking about tens of millions of lines of code and also COBOL specifically.

This is going to be a hilarious disaster but not so hilarious when people who need the benefits need them and won't be able to get them.

Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?

I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.

By rebuild I don't think they mean it's going to function the same. ...just torn apart and replaced.

They have an experienced team of teenagers don't worry.

If they planned a 1 month migration of a small component, 6 months to complete would be pretty lucky imo. Refactoring Legacy Code mentions the 2.0 approach they're taking. Spoiler alert, it doesn't work...

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".

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

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.

No they’d just blame the liberals and maintain 100% loyalty lol.

Nah, they'll just say the Democrats are still worse because reasons

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.

Bro. Check it out bro, we're gonna like make it this dope Electron app, bro. It'll interface with X, bro and everyone will have to login there to get their money, bro. Don't worry tho, you'll get paid in recession-proof Trumpbux crypto currency as long as you claim it in time. But X gets a fee of 60% bro.

Seriously bro we like hired a bunch of grads that took a one week X created code boot camp that like you know revolved around a language big balls created called "cyber coin purse++". On second thought bro we're rewriting it in that. Should be like 2 weeks to rewrite it cuz old people wrote the current code and they're like old or whatever bro. Like I live in an old person's basement and they're just like old, bro.

In theory it is a horrible idea. No port like this ever works out. An incremental approach has much higher chance of success but will take long.

in theory yeah it's not a bad idea but it's also 60 million lines of a cobol

Nah I think it will just be

const benefits = false;

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.

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