this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Enough Musk Spam
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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.
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.
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.
Goober, they're gonna need to spend money on resources migrating away from it.
Elaborate as to what the specific issue is, please.
Yeah, great. Is DOGE going to fix any of that?
That's a delusional answer.
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".
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.
Are you actually Elon Musk trying to gaslight all of us?
...not. probably not. That's what you meant to say. Right? Right??!!
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.
You have to be one of Musk's adolescent DOGE cronies
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.
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 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.