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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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”
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!”
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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.
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 😂
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Australian here.
They are robbing you
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
i hope elon and the entire “doge” team dies. i really do.
I hope they all fly around in Boeing aircraft together.
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.
Idk I think these old people will riot tbh
Months? I don’t k ow how to code, and even I know that’s impossible.
they will make chatGPT do it and then not verify.
They will cross-check with Grok.
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I’m on SSDI and VA disability. I can’t work. I’m terrified every time they even breath in the direction of either place. I’d be super fucked. Even losing SSDI would destroy us. That’s about 3/4 of our mortgage payment. So many other vets are in the same boat.
how do you do this? probably good for all of us to know
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thank you!
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.
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“…but sir, we only know Node.js…”
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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.
Well you need static types I assume, for code safety and all that.
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?
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?
I think the hope is that it fails, they don’t want social security to work.
“Whoops, we pushed to prod and have no backups. Sorrryyyy!”
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If Trump is smart, he’ll let Musk do all the unpopular project 2025 stuff, then throw him in prison at the end and escape the blame personally. This way he gets to keep popularity with his base while telling his donors they got everything they asked for. It’s what all dictators do, really.
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This clusterfck has me seriously considering whether taxes are quite as certain as death anymore.
