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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.
No. Java is not suited for this. This code runs on mainframes not some x86 shitbox cluster of dell blades. They literally could not purchase the hardware needed to switch to java in the timeline given. I get what you're trying to say but in this case Java is a hard no.
Uh, Java is specifically supported by IBM in the Power and Z ISA, and they have both their own distribution, and guides for writing Java programs for mainframes in particular.
This shouldn't be a surprise, because after Cobol, Java is the most enterprise language that has ever enterprised.
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.
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.
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.
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?
How this will go:
DOGE: "Okay Grok. Convert this COBOL code into Python."
Dumb AI: "Certainly! Here you go."
System crashes and exposes all Americans' SSNs
DOGE: "Fuckin' DEI hires...!"
Australian here.
They are robbing you
We know. Those of us who are paying attention, anyway.
"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.
Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?
The first step towards privatizing an industry is eroding public confidence in the existing program. They have absolutely no intention of improving the program, they just want to make it shitty enough that people stop believing in it. Once that happens, 45 will start shilling, and some lucky company will swoop in and take it over.
Textbook...
Yep, this is it. Show how “broken” it is by breaking it, and enough of the population won’t even notice when it’s “fixed” and they’re only getting 2/3 of what they were before (and are entitled to). Plus grift, etc.
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.
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.
It's not a case of "seeing the code isn't perfect" but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.
I'm reminded of this shitshow:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation
Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.
I'm an accountant by trade, there's a classic "techbro does accounting" style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn't spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude "it's just a database with some rules".
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
These comments are completely missing the truth.
They have zero intention of rebuilding anything, this is just an excuse to destroy SSA ...
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.
This is just another step down "I honestly just can't comprehend the stupidity of what is going on in the American government"-alley...
Like... what do they even expect to come of this? Why are they even interested in doing it? Is it just to stir up shit?
They are trying to break the government beyond all repair. At that point they'll say it's the Democrats that broke it.
Their cult members will swallow the lie hook line and sinker, and continue to keep them in power. (Side note, this will be made easier by gutting all election oversight as part of the package.)
Meanwhile, all that tax money we paid into Social Security, SNAP, Medicaid and Medicare, Unemployment insurance... basically any program meant to help people, will flow directly into billionaire's pockets.
Oh no, he wants to “rebuild the stack” from the ground up again.
I'm less than a decade from taking my SS early. I have already downloaded my SS deduction tables from their website in anticipation of them doing something this stupid. "Oh.. you think you are eligible for earned benefits? We can't seem to locate your contribution history... so sorry for you."
Months? I don't k ow how to code, and even I know that's impossible.
I know how to code, how to manage programs, how to architect huge safety-critical systems, and quite a few other things, and I know that you are right. I'd give it 5 to 7 years if it were adequately resourced, there was political commitment, and the stakeholders could be made to agree a set of requirements, then not change them unless there's a really convincing reason (conflicts with other requirements, impossible to implement, breaks everything, etc).
And the validation and verification of such a system could itself take a year or more, if it's well-planned and correctly executed.
If it fails spectaculairly who will take the blame? Will there be any repercussions at all?
Or will Musk and Trump shrug their shoulders? Halfheartedly blame Biden for badly programming the original database then go play some golf/videogaminges?
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
This clusterfck has me seriously considering whether taxes are quite as certain as death anymore.
if (!=white) {benefits=false}
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.