this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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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.
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”
My company actually wrote their flagship software in COBOL starting in the 80s, and we're only now six years into rewriting everything in a more modern language with probably four years to go.
I can't imagine trying to start such a project like rewriting all of Social Security and thinking it will take months. You have to be a special kind of fatuous to unironically think that.
Similarly, my company are 4 years into a rewrite of a cobol mainframe system much simpler than Social Security. Which was going to "take a year" there's at least 5 years left.
I know the UK benefits system took well over 12 years to build with an programming workforce of over 2000 and I imagine it's simpler having to support a population one fifth the size of the US.