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.
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.
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.