In the eighties I was trained in COBOL programming and I can confirm that chap with the sign is correct.
Don’t mess with COBOL …… it messes with your brain
one of my friends, in response to the plan to rewrite the entire SSA COBOL code base in 2-3 months: “I felt a terrible disturbance in the Force, as if millions of QA Engineers suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”
I doubt he's defending COBOL. I took at as a statement that Musk's munchkins are messing up and corrupting tons of legacy code in COBOL in the Social Security Administration. IDK myself, but it would make sense.
Yup. Also, I said SSA, but it could be IRS. And I don't know this for sure—I'm old, but COBOL was before my time we wouldn't have used it at the USGS anyway—but it would make sense.
Unemployment insurance systems, too. Recall the Covid era need for Cobol programmers when the UI laws were dramatically expanded and no one knew how to change the computer systems to accommodate them.
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He’s not even wrong, every time some smartass has tried to fix cobol code by rewriting it in something else here in Denmark it has usually lead to very costly failures. Mainly just from the accumulated complexity of the cobol code still running
To put it another way, people are expecting to rebuild millions and millions of hours of human effort and thinking with a few hundred hours of rethought and some new tools.
This is like expecting to rebuild the Twin Towers exactly as they were with a few months of effort.
This issue is way up there for discrediting DOGE - how the hell do BigBalls & the DOGE script kiddies know how to work a COBOL DB2 interface to get accurate data from government databases?
They would have easy access to the data like any other front end person. There isn't any reason to touch the legacy back end systems. Of course, we cannot actually make them understand the results (check records surprised them) but maybe when this circus is over the core systems will be intact.
No, I didn't see the hackathon. Nothing screams "well engineered" and compliant for privacy, disaster recovery, etc than a "hackathon". Why didn't we think of that before? And yes, if they only wish to steal the data then this is sufficient. Cannot wait to see it come back as a LAMP app.
Do we (well, I don't 🤣) know if the government has enabled REST APIs on their Db2 servers with non-public data? Or maybe on some but not all? DHHS still makes me download 3+ gig csv files.
(I was guessing that DOGE was being given canned reports and treating them like data dumps.)
Not sure what gov enables, I am a UNIX dork in commercial. My understanding is that IBM wanted to juice web/app development, so this option makes DB2 accessible to webheads. I built a largish system for a bank that does exactly what you say, i.e. import big reports daily and expose a web system.
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Don’t mess with COBOL …… it messes with your brain
https://bsky.app/profile/summer-b.bsky.social/post/3lm5tgu65c22k
My first job after uni was translating RPG programs into COBOL. I am not feeling nostalgic for that at all.
This is like expecting to rebuild the Twin Towers exactly as they were with a few months of effort.
Insanity.
Answer: they don't.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
(I was guessing that DOGE was being given canned reports and treating them like data dumps.)
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
...
But then why are working on rebuilding the code base? Ignorance or fraud, I suppose.