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Yeah that's not the defense you think it is.
Could you elaborate on why?
You shouldn't be using cobol in 2025
There are tons of IT systems in the government that have been running the same programming for 30+ years but if it isn't broke it doesn't get touched.
Source: Use mainframe emulators often to perform routine tasks in government HR systems.
Yeah that doesn't make it ok
Just in case you didn't know, the code is old, but the hardware still gets updates. And when it comes to batch transactions and network speed, mainframes still do the job reliably well. Plus, they are not easy to hack, because few understand them, not to mention the decades of security updates.
Ok great, still didn't make it ok
Mainframe does what it does very well, and that makes it okay.
The code may be old but the hardware gets updated. I don’t know if they’re using modern tools but the language also gets updated.
It alll comes down to budget: who wants to spend the money to modernize stuff that still works? Iss Musk willing to invest in that?
They would have to spend on new systems instead of giving tax breaks to corporate welfare queens and the landed gentry.
Money isn't the issue
Goober, they're gonna need to spend money on resources migrating away from it.
Elaborate as to what the specific issue is, please.
Good luck getting musk to pay to update the programs that most of the government uses.
These programs were written in COBOL, and they have had no reason to upgrade things that are still working.
Yeah having incorrect info isn't a reason to fix it, your right
You have to be one of Musk's adolescent DOGE cronies
You know most people support this. Trump has a positive approval rating. You guys are in the minority
How much is Daddy Elon paying you for this sad psyop attempt? Because he should probably be paying you less
You guys really hate reality
And now you're talking to yourself
That has no meaningful relation to whether they are competent or not.
This is the part everyone is missing. Real life is messy and sloppy and incomplete. Real life has bad data. All the time, especially when you’re trying to match 100 year old records. Not handling bad data s a problem of inexperience, regardless what technology you use. Announcing it as fraud, is just being an ignorant asshole.
That being said, if Musk is willing to put out the billions of dollars it would cost to modernize, that would be great! But it still has to handle bad data. Maybe musk could add hundreds of millions to the budget to hire enough people to manually confirm all the data from before the records were digitized. Good luck with that
If you want actual proof of this, look at your medical records. And I say this as a healthcare worker. All kinds of nonsense ends up in the chart for a myriad of reasons.
And that’s with modern record keeping where there are all safeguards and things are eventually digitized. Imagine the days when it was only on paper at some hospital where the records room was damaged in a flood or it wasn’t digitized for half a century so no way to check the handwriting, or the person had a strong accent or some dirt or mold fuzzed the paper, etc …..
I am one of the millions of people in the US whose name was fudged by immigration officials at Ellis Island. We know the name they wrote down and we have the family claim of what it used to be, by Mon objective way to prove it or to know why. To make this anecdote crazier, my parents went back to the old country to find records. However this was the height of the Cold War and it was behind “the iron curtain” so they were prevented from leaving their hotel under threat f arrest as spies
Yeah, great. Is DOGE going to fix any of that?
Probably
That's a delusional answer.
How
The only possible way DOGE would eliminate that code is if the agency doesn't exist anymore.
Let me get your point straight, because COBOL is an old language, you believe calling out misinformation that shows the people tasked with "finding corruption and financial mismanagement" are completely unqualified for the job isn't a "valid defense"?
A valid defense of what? The post doesn't defend COBOL, it makes no claims regarding the best way to track this data at all. It just points out that the dipshits making the claims of corruption are blatantly wrong.
Then you go on to claim that these same dipshits are going to "probably" address legacy systems? Why would you want someone who can't understand the legacy system to be in charge of replacing it? That's a recipe for disaster.
Or to put it another way. Saying the government shouldn't use COBOL "isn't the defense (of DOGE) you think it is".
Yes, it is defending cobol. Otherwise it would say this is bad and needs to be fixed
Lol, bruh... You cant be serious.
Defending COBOL would require a statement to the effect of "COBOL should be kept because X". Do you see any affirmative statement to that effect? No? Wanna take a guess as to why?
I know you won't be honest about it in your response, but you know exactly why. Because this post has nothing to do with COBOL being good, bad, or in-between for the task at hand. It's exclusively about calling out bullshit and misinformation spread by unqualified idiots.
Which brings me back around to the fact that your opinion that "COBOL should be replaced" is not a valid defense of idiots, who don't understand the systems they are tasked with using, making false claims based on misunderstandings caused by their ignorance.
No it's not. It's that they are afraid of all of the waste and corruption being exposed and losing control. They don't care about misinformation, they spread the most misinformation
Well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them think.
Are you actually Elon Musk trying to gaslight all of us?
No
What an incredibly boring troll you are.
Dumb comments get dumb replies
You could at least put some effort into it. Back in the days we would at least get the Marine Copypasta or something.
...not. probably not. That's what you meant to say. Right? Right??!!
No
Well don't worry. You're allowed to change your mind at any point in time once you realize the mistakes you've made regarding the trust and belief you've put in these people.
Right because these departments aren't rife with waste and corruption. I totally trust the Dems that are throwing a fit to defend these departments as they are exposed
No point in arguing with you, is there? You have all the answers. Good luck in life my dude
so the huge legacy codebase should be ported to....
and who's gonna do that? You?
The terrifying answer is that script kiddies will end up porting it to JavaScript and Electron and host it on AWS.
I wanted to write JavaScript first but decided against it :D
This hasn't been done because no one can do it. It's because the government sucks at this stuff
It hasn’t been done because that’s a great works project that’s on a scale you’re woefully ignorant to (this is an assumption on my part based on what I can grok of you based on your comments here).
I assure you there is a bevy of skilled developers who would love to modernize the systems they work on but the cost and level of effort is beyond what is politically viable.
If you changed your perspective from “it’s awful and bad and always will be” to “it’s awful and bad and we can make it better, how can I help” things will improve for everyone.
Mate, from reading the comments of this no-brains, he or she doesn't even know how to program in a professional capacity, much less have even the slightest clue of the scope of such a project.
That one is literally a mindless Trump/Elon fan wading into waters way, WAY, WAY beyond his depth.
I didn't say it wasn't big
I guarantee you that there are no governments, banks, or businesses older than 15 years that aren't running some old ass code that's not getting replaced any time soon.
Again that doesn't make it ok
Code is not a physical thing that spoils with age.
All that backs that sentence of yours is your uninformed opinion.
Lolololol tell that to literally every major bank, I'm sure they'll get right on it just for you.
How much experience do you have in this? Talk is cheap
You guys love the appeal to authority fallacy. You don't need to be an expert to know you shouldn't still be using programs written in cobol.
If relying on any knowledge is bad, then why should we believe what you say? That's an appeal to authority
I didn't say any knowledge. I'm saying if you reject what someone says only because they don't have some arbitrary experience that you require. That's an appeal to authority
Why should anyone listen to what you have to say? Can you give a reason without an appeal to authority?
So spend a chunk of money to hire a team to upgrade the database that's working to one that's programmed in a new language,
mightwill have errors, then have to fix those errors, and you'd also have to train the existing team or replace them with someone who knows how to use and maintain the new database. You'd potentially want to upgrade or change the hardware too from an old mainframe computer unless you want to only sidegrade to like C-90 since your old IBM computer won't support newer compilers. In the meanwhile there's a HUGE risk of breaking something or even just not getting anything accomplishedIt's definitely an objective that's good but if you're chasing efficiency and cutbacks, it's the opposite of what you'd want to do.