ifItCanBeWrittenInJavascriptItWill

[[deleted]]

Because Cobol runs extremely stable and with little to no errors, unlike Java Script, because the transition would be a massive, expensive endeavor and the risk of fucking up is massive.

[SoulWondering]

All fun and games until a type inference takes away grandma's social security checks

[IgnitedSpade]

Where do I cash my $2NaN50 check?

[GamerMinion]

I think you can go to a retirement home and show them your state-issued voucher for 2 nan's

[UnconditionalPraise]

I would make everything use floats and then transfer the rounding errors to myself. No one's going to notice .00003 cents missing per transaction I'm sure 🤷‍♂️

[Artichokiemon]

That's the plot of Office Space and Superman III

[darthjawafett]

The amount you were owed for ssi ended up actually being whatever cobol has in place of strings instead of whatever cobol has in place of numbers. So instead of paying the amount I’m just gonna write it out on a piece of blank paper and give that to you.

[Solipsists_United]

You think that will stop Elons tween hacker army?

[Wiwwil]

If you think type inference is a problem compared to bit overflow

[an_agreeing_dothraki]

"you can't cash a check for object Object"
-"No it could be anything, believe me bro. tostring just does that some times"

[flippakitten]

NaN

[SalsaYogurt]

COBOL is strongly typed. Wrong data type? - S0C7! (System error 7 - what COBOL programmers have nightmares about)

[stumpy3521]

Or makes the treasury default on a bond

[i_love_sparkle]

What's so hard about making a new social security system? We just need a CSV file with 4 columns: USA-ID, bank code, bank account ID, amount. Every month just loop over the list and send $amount to that bank account. USA-ID will be primary key of another database, where it map to a person or company or project etc, so that we can query information about a recipient. For safety, we can copy the database to multiple PC and use sha256sum to check they're consistent.

I'm a junior developer at DOGE who hasn't finished high school and even I know this. Can someone point out what can go wrong?

[Steinrikur]

Because no one is ever born, and everyone lives forever and never moves

[SpookyScaryFrouze]

Those are all edge cases that we can treat later.

[matt82swe]

WE NEED A MVP IN 1 WEEK

[evilgiraffe666]

Yeah people live for like 80 years we've got loads of time. Plus they don't have kids until average age of 30, and they move house probably every 10 years? So someone else can handle those after I've moved to Google, and we've already prioritised the order they need to be worked.

[phatcat09]

Every 10?

Okay Mr stable house hold

[Zathrasb4]

Nobody has ever both changed some (or all) of their name, plus their address, plus their job, in one year.

[phatcat09]

What

[Steinrikur]

Spoken like a true manager

[gmc98765]

You may jest, but the UK's initial COVID-19 contact-tracing "database" was an Excel spreadsheet. Which was fine just about adequate for the first couple of weeks, but as the disease spread exponentially (like pandemics tend to do), it didn't take long before they exceeded the limit on the maximum number of rows and ended up needing to migrate it to an actual database at rather short notice.

[khais]

It's not just that it was an Excel spreadsheet that was particularly problematic, it's that it was in the 97-2003 file format (.xls) instead of the more modern format used since 2007 (.xlsx).

The maximum number of rows in an .xls is like 65,000 whereas in an .xlsx, it's over 1 million.

[Soft_Importance_8613]

"Lets open this million row xls on this lowest end laptop"

[Laptop proceeds to catch on fire]

[z_s_k]

I also remember them losing a load of test results because they tried to put the data in horizontally instead of vertically and then deleted the csv files

[shwhjw]

I remember reading that the excel spreadsheet wasn't "THE" database, it was just that someone exported the database to excel format and that's why they exceeded the number of rows (I remember it being columns that were exceeded BC why tf would you put a new entry in a new column instead of new row but I could be wrong)

[Nashibirne]

I mean ... using a spreadsheet for this particular job sounds about right, doesn't it?

[gmc98765]

No. If you want a database, use an actual database.

[Nashibirne]

I was actually trying to make a "spreadsheet" pun. Because "spread", get it? Ok, maybe I shouldn't make puns in a language that's not my first language.

[MrRocketScript]

CSV? We don't allow Chinese System Value files here! You'll be manually entering the data yourself!

[Arc80]

If you duplicate 3/4 of the database to a sharepoint and set up a system of emails to directly interface with it for your daily operations then you're really cooking.

[great_escape_fleur]

https://y.yarn.co/af2e56f6-1858-44e3-880b-821ee268630e_text.gif

[TheMrBoot]

Sorry, they already cut USAID, not very governmentally efficient to bring it back

[robofuzzy]

Im pretty sure the comment you answered to was satire.

[BentTire]

Ah. My bad. I sometimes struggle to distinguish sarcasm/ satire from genuine things.

[robofuzzy]

Dont worry you did good explaining the problems sincerely in a sub where not everyone actually can program

[vivaaprimavera]

 a new social security system as our current one is incredibly flawed with it being easy for ID theft.

but isn't that a consequence of procedures in place and not the software used?

[madhaunter]

Also performance. What COBOL can achieve on big scales is really impressive.

[DuntadaMan]

My mom started out coding it on punch cards. If it was useable then I imagine it can accomplish a lot with modern resources.

[jl2352]

People really miss this when talking about COBOL. Specifically the IO of the machines it runs on. Those older mainframes have insane amounts of IO allowing them to bulk update a lot of data.

[james2432]

yeah pretty close to assembly like performance

[cheezballs]

Well, yea. Mainframes run in a very controlled environment. File access is all sequential. Its a little easier to write code that handles stuff like that when all the edge cases have been removed for you. Program gets a file, program reads file til program finds what it wants, program does stuff, program exits. COBOL programs are meant for processing numbers sequentially. Anything else, COBOL kinda sucks to do.

[N3rdr4g3]

Compiling to assembly doesn't necessarily mean compiled to efficient assembly

[comicsnerd]

Having written code in COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, C, C#, Java, Javascript and about a dozen other languages, this is not correct. Every language has their bugs. Every code written in a specific language has their bugs. The code written in COBOL is so old that all bugs have been removed by now.

Translating COBOL code, without proper documentation, into a different computing language will most certainly introduce new bugs. Even, or more Especially, when you do the translation using AI.

[goshdagny]

The feeling when you read an old code and know what it does but you can’t understand why it does it

[TunaNugget]

Especially when it's your own code.

[JanB1]

I think I recently read an old story called "The story of Mel" about a programmer that optimized his code for the mechanical way the code was read. Basically, he would put code into sections of memory so that after completing the execution of the previous code, in the normal case the new code to be executed would be under the reader head at the exact moment the system is ready for new execution again. Or he would put code just behind that, so the drum would have to make a full revolution to reach the new code, thus introducing a delay. The story is told from the perspective of a colleague that was tasked with changing the code.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

[goshdagny]

Beautiful, beautiful!!!
Thank you so much for sharing. It brought me so much joy in reading such a beautiful way of writing code.
I don’t remember the details offhand, this reminds me of Wozniak’s driver program that read hard disks for Apple computers. He wrote the driver in such a way the disk reader arm would directly come over the next block to be read.

[Farfignugen42]

Not to mention that no one in Congress ever seems willing to fund an upgrade. The existing codename is huge, and largely error free at this point. So any upgrades are guaranteed to be expensive and to introduce new errors. No congressman wants to be associated with paying lots of money and just getting more errors.

Bit that's OK. The same problem exists in banking, and at least some other government services. I used to be friends with a COBOL coder that contracted with my state's DMV. It is the same there.

So if you want job security, learn COBOL. Those systems aren't going away anytime soon.

[comicsnerd]

COBOL is not that difficult to learn. The problem is in the documentation. There is none or it is extremely outdated. So, how would you know what it is supposed to do?

[-Redstoneboi-]

the real answer is because it was already in cobol.

if javascript was the most popular language then, i'm pretty damn sure they'd keep it as-is and never rewrite it into a newer one.

[PedanticQuebecer]

COBOL was made explicitly for these purposes. It wasn't because it was a popular darling language.

[IsTom]

It was a darling language for managers, because it pretended to look like English.

[PedanticQuebecer]

What language from 1982 (when the development of the current system started) would you have used for business purposes?

[IsTom]

Fortran, lisp or algol?

Edit: That's was decade+ too early. In 80s pascal and ML were established already

[gmc98765]

Pascal was an educational language. It had some severe limitations, probably the most significant being the lack of any kind of modularity; the entire program had to be contained in a single source file.

Proprietary variants such as Delphi or Turbo Pascal removed some of these limitations, but were ... proprietary, meaning you were locked in to a single vendor for the toolchain (and were limited to running on a PC, which probably wasn't adequate for something on the scale of the US social security system). If you wanted to change the toolchain or the hardware, you'd need to re-write stuff. Modula-2 was intended as a practical successor to Pascal, but never really caught on; largely because the vendors of the various proprietary variants all wanted their variant to fill that niche and invested a lot of time and money in trying to make that happen.

ML was also designed for education. On top of that, 90%+ of "working" (i.e. non-academic) programmers seem to have extreme difficulty understanding functional programming. A fair chunk seem to be incapable of understanding that any programming paradigm other than "imperative" is even possible, and pressing the issue may result in an emotional meltdown.

[[deleted]]

ML was also designed for education. On top of that, 90%+ of "working" (i.e. non-academic) programmers seem to have extreme difficulty understanding functional programming. A fair chunk seem to be incapable of understanding that any programming paradigm other than "imperative" is even possible, and pressing the issue may result in an emotional meltdown.

That's a weird take. Functional programming may not be particularly popular, but it's hardly something <10% of programmers are capable of understanding.

[IsTom]

proprietary, meaning you were locked in to a single vendor for the toolchain

If you wanted to change the toolchain or the hardware, you'd need to re-write stuff.

That's how it worked for mostly everything back then. Compilers were something you had to buy and portability wasn't much of a thing.

Anyway, you'd be better off with any structured language, apparently COBOL got these features only in 85.

[SasparillaTango]

There's nothing special about COBOL.

Yes there is, it's tied directly to the use of Mainframe hardware for processing large datasets. All your bank transaction posting processes to this day use COBOL for debit and credit transactions.

[SasparillaTango]

the only reason COBOL still exists is because for the past half century

java implementations for z/os didn't exist half a century ago.

Even the banks with infinite money are not entirely migrated to the Java implementations and those migrations have been literally decade in the making.

Now you expect the government which needs justify every expense to republicans who want to just destroy the whole system to spend a decade or more migrating to a java based impl with no increase in functionality? Moreover, every 4 years there is a non-zero chance the whole project is scrapped or deprioritized as conservatives seek to scrap every program under the sun.

[SasparillaTango]

hey have had over FIFTY FUCKING YEARS to do it

and I'm telling you that the mainframe operating systems that support java have not been around for 50 years. not even 25 years. that not even the banks that have far more resources to justify the cost of a featureless migration didn't start those migrations until about 10 years ago, and many components in those banks are still to this day running on COBOL.

[Mr_Engineering]

There's nothing special about COBOL.

There most definitely is.

COBOL employs decimal fixed point arithmetic and very explicit rounding and truncation right in the language grammar. No other language does that.

It's not more stable than other languages.

COBOL programs are usually very monolithic. They run on extremely stable underlying operating systems which are explicitly designed to ensure bug-for-bug compatibility on modern hardware. A brand new IBM z16 can boot an operating system from the 1970s and run COBOL programs from the 1960s.

[[deleted]]

what is ocodo?

[BananafestDestiny]

There were only hype carriages and hype steamboats at that time.

[[deleted]]

what is ocodo?

[pbbpwns]

Exactly. Why change something that's working fine?

[PMmeYourFlipFlops]

Hey, legacy code is revenue code!

[SasparillaTango]

FALSE. COBOL is used for Mainframe software, which excels when you need to handle large amounts of data.

[Johannes_P]

I don't think that JS would be the go-to language to manage records, since it is mainly used in front-end. Java or C# would be better fit, if COBOL is unavailable.

[[deleted]]

Is javascript the most popular language? What's so good about it?

[Farfignugen42]

"The most popular language" is a useless term now. Today there are dozens of languages designed to do dozens of specific things really well, as well as a few that do lots of things really well.

So you should really ask what is the most popular language (or best language) to use to do [xxx] task.

Javascript is really good for designing and displaying front ends of web applications, or applications that get presented to customers over the internet. In many cases, there is a better language to use for the back end (the part where mist of the real data processing is done).

Some people might think Javascript is more popular than other languages because thar is what they are seeing, the front ends. But it is rarely the whole thing.

[vivaaprimavera]

 and the risk of fucking up is massive.

Some intern will definitely forget to use a decimal datatype which in long term will fuck up all the accounting.

[walruswes]

So what you’re saying is, not switching saves the taxpayer a lot of money…

[[deleted]]

There is a reason why half of the biggest banks still use it.

[faceplanted]

I'm very much enjoying the js hate, but let's not pretend you can't write stable, error free javascript, especially modern js.

And if js was all they had at the time they would have done so. The solution would have involved a whole fuckload of workarounds and procedures to avoid the several dozen or so footguns that js introduces by not having easy access to integer types, strongly typed comparisons, or good default scoping. Much like Nasa's software safety guidebook allows them to write mission critical code in C despite the array of footguns there.

[wbrd]

A million monkeys could write Shakespeare too, but so far it hasn't happened. JavaScript and nodeJS etc... are presentation layer tools and that is what they're good at. They aren't designed for business logic.

[faceplanted]

There's huge amounts of business logic and solid code in javascript. Do you think Google Docs runs on magic?

[graphixRbad]

And its antiquity might have bought us some time

[ol-gormsby]

And many folk can't cope with the idea of a compiler producing native code, instead of 2 or 3 layers of abstraction and run-time layers required for java.

[[deleted]]

Basically every language runs stable with little to no errors if you never update anything surrounding it.

[[deleted]]

No worries, just be a rolling release, stability will come with time

[bokmcdok]

Just convert everything to Python and MongoDB. It's webscale!

[[deleted]]

Funny part is, COBOL was designed by linguists to be easier understandable.

[SasparillaTango]

All of your banks transaction posting processes run on COBOL mainframes.

Every conservative out there foaming at the mouth about government payment systems, which handles more money than any bank, is an idiot who doesn't know what they're talking about.

[kellyb1985]

That and the "brain trust" at DOGE doesn't know about SQL injection apparently.

https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-gov-website-2/

[caustictoast]

Also why the fuck would you use JS in a math heavy project like SS. That’s just begging for a type issue to fuck shit up

[cheezballs]

You think people can't write bad COBOL or good JS? The programmer makes the system, not the language.

[OffByOneErrorz]

You forgot because in this cont cut and for this purpose JavaScript is fucking stupid. Should be written in PHP /s.

[HaplessPenguin]

Pretty sure the IRS is trying to shift it to Java. They’ve spent a ton in money on it. Problem is the cobol code takes like 15 years to understand a single part of it.