Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
“We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”
So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.
I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.
It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.
Jokes aside, nothing wrong with rewriting in Java. It is well-suited for this kind of thing.
Rewriting it in anything without fully understanding the original code (the fact they think 150yo are collecting benefits tells me they don’t) is the biggest mistake here. I own codebases much smaller than the SSA code and there are still things I don’t fully understand about it AND I’ve caused outages because of it.
I’ve worked on these “cost saving” government rewrites before. The problem is getting decades of domain logic and behavior down to where people can be productive. It takes a lot of care and nuance to do this well.
Since these nazi pea brains can’t even secure a db properly I have my doubts they’ll do this successfully.
Not just domain logic. The implementation logic is often weird too. Cobol systems have crash/restart behaviour and other obscure semantics that often end up being used in anger; it’s like using exceptions for control flow, but exceedingly obscure and unfortunately (from what I’ve seen of production cobol) a “common trick” in lots of real-world deployments.
Ah yes, a classic tale…
“We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”
So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.
I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.
It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.
Edit: Fixed some typos.
Jokes aside, nothing wrong with rewriting in Java. It is well-suited for this kind of thing.
Rewriting it in anything without fully understanding the original code (the fact they think 150yo are collecting benefits tells me they don’t) is the biggest mistake here. I own codebases much smaller than the SSA code and there are still things I don’t fully understand about it AND I’ve caused outages because of it.
I’ve worked on these “cost saving” government rewrites before. The problem is getting decades of domain logic and behavior down to where people can be productive. It takes a lot of care and nuance to do this well.
Since these nazi pea brains can’t even secure a db properly I have my doubts they’ll do this successfully.
Not just domain logic. The implementation logic is often weird too. Cobol systems have crash/restart behaviour and other obscure semantics that often end up being used in anger; it’s like using exceptions for control flow, but exceedingly obscure and unfortunately (from what I’ve seen of production cobol) a “common trick” in lots of real-world deployments.
Functional, yes. But rarely are these sorts of things efficient. They’re covered in decades of cruft and workarounds.
Which just makes them that much harder to port to a different language. Especially by some 19 year old who goes by “Big Balls”
They’re not going to use Java, it’s going to be typescript.
Or Rust
You think those script kiddies know Rust?
No, but they want to seem cool
And they’ll use Grok to write the code anyway 😂