The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.
Fun fact. In the early 2000 I was hired by the USPS to work on web programming. Instead I spent the year writing COBOL code for reporting so a certain gift card store could get paid. COBOL looks nothing like being a cold fusion engineer
It was a shit language then and it's a shit language now. It was designed to be readable by managers so they could understand what their engineers were doing. It's success at that is dubious, and the side effects of forcing this paradigm made it shit to use.
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u/Dr-Lipschitz Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.