This has the stench of junior engineer all over it. This rewrite will go way over budget and come limping across the finish line late, with more bugs and less features than the system it replaces. I guarantee it.
“ROFL”
Signed, everyone who has been involved in migrating a codebase before.
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.
I’m on SSDI (and Medicaid and HUD housing) and have been having insane anxiety the last month and a half to the point that I’m wondering if I’ll even get paid in April. I regularly check my SSA account online to make sure my direct deposit is still freaking scheduled. Missing a payment could mess up all of my other benefits as well.
I know the fuck up is coming, but I don’t know if I can handle another few months hoping they don’t fuck up the migration if they don’t fuck up just paying people first with all that’s been going on.
I’m pretty sure Im not the only one in this situation who can’t handle the stress of this bullshit.
To be fair. We assume “months” means less than 2 years. But 10 years can also be “months”, and is probably a more realistic timeline.
Nobody is referring to 10 years as “months”.
When you’re talking about multiples of years, it’s going to be called years, not months. They were obviously talking about a short timeline, less than 2 years, likely less than 1 year.
They have no idea what they’re talking about.
Like I said, months is a joke.
So was what I said. I was presenting a hypothetical way they justify their ridiculous claims by doing something else ridiculous.
But conveying tone in text is difficult, so I’m not surprised you missed what I was going for.
Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?
With Grok looking more and more like the only one working for Musk with enough (digital) balls to stand up to his boss, that might be better than the alternative of “Big Balls” and the rest of the Digital Oblivous Goons of Elon
They’ll have it lobotomized in a few days.
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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.
They have an experienced team of teenagers don’t worry.
That is the mother load of all code bases. Probably still some COBOL if not mostly cobol.
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.
Non programmer but skilled with computers type guy here: what makes Java well suited for this?
This is probably an incorrect prejudice of mine, but I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster. Didn’t people used to rip on Java for being inefficient and too abstracted?
Last language I had any experience with was C++ in high school programming class in the early 2000s, so I’m very ignorant of anything modern.
Java can be pretty damn efficient for long running processes because it optimizes at runtime. It also can use new hardware features (like cpu instructions) without having to compile for specific platforms so in practice it gets a boost there. Honestly, the worst thing about Java is the weird corporate ecosystem that produces factoryfactory and other overengineered esoteric weirdness. It can also do FFI with anything that can bind via c ABI so if some part of the program needed some hand optimized code like something from BLAS it could be done that way.
All that to say it doesn’t matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.
Why is there a need to rewrite it at all? Is it because COBOL is basically ancient hieroglyphics to modern programmers thus making it hard to maintain or update?
They want to make buttloads of money from a rewrite, and it would cost buttloads to do this. They probably also want things to run like shit and cause misery for retired Americans.
Refactoring a code base is kinda like general maintenance for the application. Over time deprecated features, temp fixes, etc. start to be a lot of the code base. By cleaning things up you can make it more maintainable, efficient, etc.
That being said, for systems this large you usually fix up parts of it and iterate over time. Trying to do the whole code base is hard cause it’s like replacing the engine while the car is in motion.
refactor is one thing, rewrite everything in a new language is another thing.
Yet it’s the thing every junior dev wants to do as they gain more experience.
Oh yeah, definitely.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree it needs to be rewritten. Hiring programmers that are willing to work in cobol would certainly be harder than other languages though, because you’ll have a much smaller candidate pool and people would be unlikely to see learning cobol as a good career investment
COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don’t want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language’s current standard dates to 2023.
It’s at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you’ll be a career bureaucrat but that’s up sufficiently many people’s alley, no “move fast and break things”, it’s “move slowly and keep things running”.
The language isn’t the problem with COBOL, it’s the likelihood that you will be maintaining (not adding to, but maintaining) a software system that may not have any docs and the original implementers are dead. Next, there will be nobody to verify the business rules that are specified in the code. Finally after you make a mistake about a business rule, you will be thrown under the bus.
Everything that you said is correct, except the prevalence of the career advice. I would bet most people looking for their first job out of school don’t even know COBOL is a language.
Well, the other thing about COBOL is that most people would regard it as a living death to have to deal with it as a day job.
And I’ve had interactions with offshore COBOL shops. The ones I worked with were not at all good. You’ll never get 99th-percentile coders to work in that language, unless their only motivation is money.
The attractiveness of learning it was that you could avoid boom and bus cycles of retrenchment and clowns like Elon musk. Unfortunately that isn’t true anymore so I think once the dust settles, finding people willing to specialize in tech like this is going to get real hard.
Is that true everywhere or just in the US? I know that, at least a few years ago, a bunch of banking software in the US was still in COBOL but parts of Western Europe were modernizing their banking industry. I’m probably going back to school for computer science in the fall and had been considering trying to learn COBOL in my free time, or learning more Fortran (I have actually taken a programming class with Fortran, but because it was aimed at beginners it didn’t really go in depth, but I bet it’d look good on certain resumes). It’s looking like my future is in Europe somewhere, so I’m keeping that in the back of my mind while making decisions.
COBOL code, like any code, was written to embody certain business processes, and also to work around the quirks and blind spots of COBOL. And the people who understood those business processes are likely to be dead by now, and any documentation they wrote might be current and correct, or it might not. And very few people under the age of 60 have ever used COBOL in anger. So any legacy replacement project is going to have to encompass a big reverse-engineering effort, including analysis of a code base nobody is familiar with.
I’m old. A friend of mine is a fair bit older, getting into his late 70s. He knows COBOL but his main area of expertise is OS services, database tuning and assembler on old IBM and Fujitsu iron. Those are critical to keeping those old systems running well. He works half-time, is booked over a year out, and has a jaw-dropping daily rate. He also has a rider: one provision is that they have to tell him where he can smoke on-site, and if the answer is “nowhere,” the deal is off. Also, he won’t schedule any work that conficts with Burning Man, and he looks like a homeless guy. I brought him in on a consulting gig once. He did his bit, including an amazingly effective presentation to the C-levels (despite his profoundly non-executive appearance), and went his merry way. Saved us a fortune. You need people like that in order to have even a remote chance of success, and they’re becoming exceedingly rare. Musk and his kiddies don’t even know what they don’t know.
Yeah, Java can run maybe half as fast as equivalently complex C, while being far more maintainable. But to see that kind of performance, you’ll want to use POJOs (plain old Java objects), not that enterprise bullshit. And there are many other optimization techniques that your average Java coder wouldn’t see in their average coding job. I’ve been there, didn’t like it. If I’m going to be dropping down to C for the hot spots, I’d rather use Python.
All that to say it doesn’t matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.
Schedule-driven development by people with no domain knowledge, with poorly understood requirements and life-and-limb-critical outcomes, led by an unpredictable moron. What could go wrong?
I wouldn’t assume that Java is only half as fast as C for every workload. It’s probably a lot closer than you think in a lot of real world scenarios.
The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.
Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.
Java can be fast at runtime, but optimization is most effective on frequently-run, repetitive sections of code.
The slow Java interpreter spin-up time was a big annoyance for use of Java in serverless cloud functions. Now the big cloud providers have ways to minimize that spin-up delay.
I am a programmer but I’m not sure why people think Java is suited for anything, especially a system so sensitive to bugs. It’s so hard to write high quality readable code in Java. Everything is way more clunky, and verbose than it needs to be.
Some major improvements were made with versions 17+ but still, it feels like walking through mud.
It’s a language from the 1990s for the 1990s.
Btw the performance is actually pretty good in Java, the old reputation for slowness is entirely undeserved today.
It’s a verbose language but I don’t know if there’s any real language that encourages highly readable code beyond low-level syntax. You want to create a God-class in Python with nonsensical variables and 5 levels of nesting? The language won’t stop you.
Anecdotally, Python is about three times as concise as Java. You have to write lots of boilerplate to do anything much more complex than Hello World in Java. And one of the oldest and most reproducible results in software engineering is that the defect rate is proportional to the number of lines of executable code. The more concise the language, the cheaper it is to maintain. This has been measured in hundreds of environments, with dozens of languages, over decades.
Python is slow, though, so there are some situations where it’s not a good choice. But those cases are probably less numerous than you might assume. There have been a few occasions where I was told Python would be too slow, I’ve then built a proof-of-concept, and it was more than fast enough. People suck at knowing where bottlenecks are in complex systems.
And now that the Python project has finally bitten the bullet and taken measures to allow removal of the GIL, things might improve considerably, though Python’s dynamic nature and some features of its type inference mean that some things it does will never be ultra-speedy.
If it has to be JVM, then Kotlin. Java done properly.
I wish Java was declared deprecated back in 2017 when Kotlin was adopted for Android and supported by Spring. It was the only sensible way forward for JVM. Sure with containerization there’s some debate for the necessity of JVM at all but its GC and runtime optimizations are nice.
Java has still an enormous adoption, though. It’d be very self harming making it deprecated. And I don’t think containerization solves majority of cases, perhaps it does it better in backend. So both GC and Java are here with us like forever 🤷♂️
Other than hardware issues, which someone else mentioned, it has a lot of enterprise-grade functionality that make it more secure and auditable than a lot of other languages. And despite, or maybe because of, its large memory footprint it’s actually faster than most languages.
I totally get any hate about writing Java though. It is a verbose language. Using Kotlin instead helps with that.
I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster
They’re neither necessarily simpler nor faster.
COBOL is simple, but outside its sweet spot, it can’t do much. That sweet spot is high volumes of relatively trivial calculations, coded by non-superstar coders. It’s moderately efficient because it doesn’t do all that much.
Of the oldest languages still in use, FORTRAN has gone through a few generations of incremental improvements, and for complex mathematical calculations, it can be faster than shit off a hot shovel. But again, it’s limited in scope, its data typing is lousy, its general-purpose programming capabilities are poor, and any integration you do with other systems is going to be a vision of hell. I still deal with a FORTRAN codebase on my job, there are some situations where it’s still one of the least-bad options.
Then, the last of the surviving languages of that vintage is Lisp. It can be insanely fast, but despite its simple syntax and semantics, nobody would call Lisp programming simple. Accounting-system coders would recoil in horror.
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.
well the new ruleset they will implement is quite simple:
IF user wants money AND user is rich THEN accept request ELSE fuck off
the tricky part is to say fuck off in a subtle enough way their maga shills think it’s perfectly normal in order to save the nation blah blah blah
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.
I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.
Nah B. This will be Extreme Agile XP with testing exclusively in Prod. Xitter will be the code repository.
Pair programming with Grok.
Spotty DOGE intern developer: “what’s a for loop?”
Grok: “Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!”
I’d think they’d put the commits onto the blockchain.
It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.
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 😂
Rust is not a language I’d use for financial apps, but it’s not a bad language. So I doubt that they’d use it. Musk is of a generation where he’d probably tell them to use PHP. Or if he listens to the twenty-something bros around him, maybe it’d be Dart, which is another decent language that’s not well suited to the problem domain.
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What’s “vibe programming”?
Stupid term for when people who don’t know how to program ask AI to generate code for them which they have no expertise to actually validate.
Edit: It took 20 minutes, but I finally found the poster child for vibe coding (time well spent):
Of course Leo has a fish in his PFP
The best commercial models did dumb stuff yesterday and I bet they’ll still do dumb stuff tomorrow
It’s when people try to have LLM’s generate code and then try to assemble the pieces produced into semi-functional, usually really bad, software I think.
And I think “vibe” means that they have no experience with programming so they can’t read the code they copy.
It’s understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.
I’ve worked on teams converting legacy code for most of my life. The planning for something like this would take longer than six months.
If this proceeds in Trump’s corrupt government, Elon will get the contract, will claim it is too broken to salvage, and will privatize it. The only way this goes anywhere is if Trump and musk stand to gain money, and they stand to gain a lot.
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…
Just determining the requirements would be a nightmare.
As long as Big Ballz is running things, I’m sure it will all be fine!
/s
Australian here.
They are robbing you
We know. Those of us who are paying attention, anyway.
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Therapist: Stop being silly, you can’t hear emojis.
^ the emojis
Wait, emojis are audible?
There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:
- It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
- It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
Also : it’s very complex and it happens to work fine for decades.
If one day i write a code project and manage to make it work without any major issues for several decades, there is no way i attemptto rewrite it.
Yeah, there’s almost 100 years of law, case law and agency regulations built into how this software works. And they fired all the people that knew anything about it.
But dude, bro, we could put the entire system on the blockchain man, and make it super efficient with an AI backend that will remove all errors bro.
Dude it’s not even written in Rust bro. WTF is this dinosaur shit?
I don’t think Rust is a bad language for doing same things people do with C++, but with a smaller standard and less legacy.
But yep, that’s the kind of people.
About dinosaur things - I’ve started learning Tcl/Tk and it’s just wonderful.
Tcl’s small but, in its own weird way, almost perfectly formed. Seeing it mentioned after all those decades raised a smile.
Oh Rust is great, and it’s on my learning to do list…but its evangelists are annoying as shit.
Agree, one of the reasons I haven’t even started trying
It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
There are no such systems. What instead happens is that the surrounding business process gets distorted to work around the unfixed major bugs. And then, everyone involved retires and nobody knows anymore why things are done that way.
I know devs like everything to be perfect, but if your business can work around it for 15 years without fixing the bug or replacing the system, I dare say it doesn’t qualify as a major bug.
They’re really playing with fire here.
So many MAGA supporters are seniors who are entirely dependent on OASDI. If Trump’s minions break this, we’re going to see torches and pitchforks strapped to electric scooters and golf carts coming out of Florida retirement communities in droves.
No they’d just blame the liberals and maintain 100% loyalty lol.
Nah, they’ll just say the Democrats are still worse because reasons
The reason is that it takes a lot of emotional intelligence and strength to admit that you have been scammed. These people will find it less emotionally painful to deny reality then admit their mistakes.
Yes. They need to move quickly. Public opinion is already shifting against Trump and Musk, and right now they are vulnerable.
This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn’t perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
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.
Yeah, I’ve cleaned up the messes that idiots like that have left.
That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system’s evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.
Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.
“…but sir, we only know Node.js…”
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.
Node.js is a fantastic tool for web servers. Its event loop allows it to rival much lower-level languages in performance while remaining easy to write and maintain. JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for nearly a decade.
Just no man.
Yes, JavaScript has been the most popular language but it is exclusively because of the front-end. Many companies do not want to pay for separate back-end devs and ask their front-end devs to do it instead. These people (ab)use JS because they’re most comfortable with it and are under crunch; so we end up with the abomination that is back-end JS.
It is NOT rivaling much lower-level languages; it can’t even rival C#.
First off, it is interpreted. You are never going to be faster than competently written C, C++, Go, nor Rust. Secondly, the resources it takes to exist makes in a non-option for embedded machines - which Social-Security facilities are all but guaranteed to use.
Not to mention the horrendous (and insecure) package infrastructure, and under-powered core libraries - it would be the fullest extent disaster.
The saddest part? The larpers at DOG(shit)E are all but guaranteed to pick the worst tools for the job, over-engineer, and have extremely poor management. Meaning whatever they ship WILL collaspe the system day 1; and all of the people refusing to pay attention will be like “hOw CouLd THis HaPPen”
I was only responding to the idea that no one should ever use NodeJS, as it’s good as a web server.
A Honda Civic is a great car for what it’s built for and people know how to drive it. But I wouldn’t use it to haul gravel or drive the Indy 500.
Well you need static types I assume, for code safety and all that.
In theory, it wouldn’t be a necessarily bad idea to port the COBOL code to something more modern, but I cannot trust Muskrat and a few vibe coder youngsters with this task.
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
If these people are good enough to redo federal codebases I should apply for a coding job already
These comments are completely missing the truth.
They have zero intention of rebuilding anything, this is just an excuse to destroy SSA …
This is my suspicion as well.
Gonna blow up the database as many times as they blow up SpaceX rockets.
Sooo only gonna blow up the test databases?
They’re not rebuilding anything. They’re just adding back doors everywhere. If anyone hasn’t learned yet, these are crackpot script kiddies at best. Even If somehow control is take away from them, they are now going to definitely have to redo the entire thing to make sure none of their shit code survives.
AT BEST it’s gonna be some ridiculous npm svalbard worth of projects in one tree, require all new hardware, and declare bankruptcy on the way. Canada did this with the Phoenix Pay System, except didn’t have ‘efficient’ funding so it only sucked but didn’t die.
step 1. rewrite into spaghetti code
step 2. nobody understands the new code, so the govt has to contract elon musk for code maintenance forever
step 3. profit
So the way things already were?
