learn Cobol you uneducated teenagers
Conspiracy theory: They know this, but being able to claim to their followers, with official records to show for it, who know NOTHING about programming, is an easy, effective win for them. They can claim fraud to their gullible audience and now have records they can point to and say “LOOK! THEY’RE GIVING DEAD PEOPLE SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY!”
This is why you come up with a hypothesis before running an experiment and collecting data. Otherwise you can pick a pattern in the data to propose just the right hypothesis.
I keep hearing that gen Z is actually pretty shit with understanding things outside GUIs.
And now I’m watching it actively destroy my country.
I’m gen z, I use Vim, and I voted for Kamala. Guess all those VS Code kids voted Trump.
Less of a generational problem, more of an educational one. Selfish, badly educated grifters that got pushed into high offices can be of any age. Musk also didn’t recognize SQL when he looked at it, which is arguably even more funny.
More of a late gen z, gen alpha thing.
The actual payment system stops payments automatically at age 115 and requires manual verification to restart. The database that is being reported is not even a report of who is getting paid.
This is just dramatic, public evidence of the arrogance and incompetence of DOGE from down to his racist younglings.
For a while, I thought they would at least be good at technology. This episode shows that even that is not true.
How he chose this elite group of chuckleheads is an eyebrow raiser. Other than racism, they seem to have no credentials at all. I mean, on brand for this administration I guess.
115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier
There are other verification procedures in place as well. This is something like a failsafe.
If that’s what you want they should be staffing up instead of firing.
Absolutely, DOGE is obviously committing crimes doing what they are doing
They’re going to need lots more people going around talking to old people because you don’t want to rely on public records
Too bad he let go of all the employees that would be responsible for that manual verification.
Jesus fucking christ the interns who have neither seen nor heard of COBOL have also not encountered the concept of a sentinel value used as a fallback/default.
Cant wait till 2038!
Date time types have long since been based on a 64 bit number , at least in Linux. However the old 32 bit date time types are still there so older programs won’t break, and probably on emdpbedded systems.p. So it comes down to the apps: how many old apps or old embedded systems will still be around?
How many cobol systems are still around in 2025. If it works, don’t fix it. And I have a feeling a lot of things will need fixing in 2038 lol
It will be interesting to see that play out. The thing is the 238 prboem spas long been solved just like the y2k problem was.
The Linux datetime types were moved to 64 bit values long ago, so this problem is thousands of years out. The old 32 bit values was a limitation of older systems not handling larger values, but almost all hardware today is either 64 bit or has hardware support for 64 bit data. You mainly have some older embedded systems
But the legacy 32 bit APIs are still there so it doesn’t break backward compatibility. You have huge ecosystems of software that still use these APIs and may still handle datelines as 32bit. There’s no way to find them all, much less make sure they’ve been updated.
Just like y2k, 2038 will have been a long solved issue, that may still exist due to ancient or poorly written applications. All you can do is a huge effort of trying everything to find any remaining issues before they cause problems. I’m optimistic because y2k was a problem cased by every application handling their own dates, whereas for 2038 its cause was in an underlying data type that has long since been fixed. Surely all applications will have been rebuilt to the new API in that 20 year or so period, right? Right?
I expect governments to set up own time servers and reset it to 1970 before upgrading their old Win XP machines.
What do you expect? most of the guys in “DOGE” weren’t even alive on 9/11 I’m a bit surprised that they still have something in COBOL, maintenance probably costs o fortune, good luck finding young COBOL devs
Is being a COBOL dev something that can get you jobs?
I’m pretty good at FORTRAN and would love that kind of “you have invaluable skills so we can’t get rid of you for being queer” gig.
I’m ready to learn COBOL. I will take up the torch. If you know good places to start, let me know. Last time I looked into it it seems way more involved than running stuff like Python, Java, and C.
I see, you want that that Lamorghini, well if you really want udemy is always a good start. Personally the difficult part for me when learning a new programing language is not resources, it’s the motivation to keep do it and I usually need a real project to work on. (10 years + dev)
Usually you find on github “awesome-XYZ” repos (ex: awesome python, awesome c, awesome go), but for cobol, most of the projects are dead
https://github.com/loveOSS/awesome-cobol?tab=readme-ov-file#email
These are the same interns that are pushing code in production, right?
Teenage programmers can understand legacy code. These ones didn’t. Don’t dis teen coders.
The issue isn’t inherently age it’s just time and experience, understanding different coding patterns and paradigms that have changed over the years etc. Even someone who’s been coding every day from ages 14-20 can’t have the same knowledge and experience as someone who’s been working with software since the 90s or earlier. Granted, there will always be brilliant people who even when lacking experience are more talented and skillful than maybe the majority, but that is uncommon. I’m only in my late 20s. And I remember in college there was a huge diversity of skills, from “are you sure this career path is really a good idea for you?” To “holy hell how did you do all of that in one hackathon?” But even for those really smart folks, they aren’t just going to inherently understand all the different ways to organize and structure code, all the conventions that exist, and more importantly why those methods and structures exist and the history that informed them. I’m not saying you need on the ground experience (although, I’d say many people do, as many people can’t really internalize things without direct exposure), but there’s just not enough time, literally, in the handful of years that is childhood and teenage years to absorb all that history.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that, yes, I agree that the problem isn’t inherently about being teenagers but I do think it’s a valid criticism that it’s kind of ridiculous to have such young folks leading this kind of project given it’s literally impossible for them to have the same amount of experience as software vets. It’s also valid that young people are capable of seeing things in very new ways, since they aren’t weighed down by al that history. But that’s why diversity is useful especially for such a monumental project as this.
I think it makes sense that people who don’t have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won’t be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for “data unknown”.
This is not a problem specific of teenage programmers - it is natural for just about everybody to not really know the ins and outs of a language and best practices when programming with it, when they just learned it and haven’t actually been using it in projects for a year or two at least.
What’s specific to teenagers (and young coders in general) is that:
- They’re very unlikely to have programmed with COBOL for a year or two, mainly because people when they start tend to gravitate towards “cool” stuff, which COBOL hasn’t been for 4 decades.
- They haven’t been doing software engineering for long enough to have realized the stuff I just explained above - in their near-peak Dunning-Krugger expertise in the software engineering field, they really do think that learning to program in a given language is the same as having figured out how to properly use it.
I think it makes sense that people who don’t have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won’t be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for “data unknown”.
The whole “COBOL’s default date is 1875” thing is just a lie. COBOL doesn’t even have a date type.
So the problem doesn’t have anything to do with COBOL, someone just made it up
my brother taught me to code when i was 6, so at 19 i had 13 years of experience already. At 6 i was mostly doing simple stuff like qbasic, vb6, but still it adds up. I’m not saying I’m a great coder, not by a long shot, just that I was experienced as a teenager. I assume a lot of these teenagers are much better than i was.
I’ve been surprised multiple times by coworkers who don’t know the significance of midnight January 1st 1970… We support an embedded Linux device, among other things…
How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?
I studied COBOL a bit in college and it’s not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason …
I’m familiar with a dozen or so teenage romhackers. Assembly is surely harder to get the big picture of than cobol, but they’re making incredible changes to 30-yo video games.
Learning to COBOL is not itself that hard.
Understanding decades of “business” logic is.
It isn’t WHAT it is doing, it’s WHY it is doing it that makes these systems labyrinthian.
Also afaik they don’t get paid that well which is part of the problem.
I don’t know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc…
There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.
You wouldn’t say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven’t had the time to get to greybeard level yet
I would imagine these teens didn’t learn through the conventional educational channels.
Yeah that’s not the defense you think it is.
How much experience do you have in this? Talk is cheap
Could you elaborate on why?
You shouldn’t be using cobol in 2025
Good luck getting musk to pay to update the programs that most of the government uses.
These programs were written in COBOL, and they have had no reason to upgrade things that are still working.
They would have to spend on new systems instead of giving tax breaks to corporate welfare queens and the landed gentry.
There are tons of IT systems in the government that have been running the same programming for 30+ years but if it isn’t broke it doesn’t get touched.
Source: Use mainframe emulators often to perform routine tasks in government HR systems.
Yeah that doesn’t make it ok
Just in case you didn’t know, the code is old, but the hardware still gets updates. And when it comes to batch transactions and network speed, mainframes still do the job reliably well. Plus, they are not easy to hack, because few understand them, not to mention the decades of security updates.
The code may be old but the hardware gets updated. I don’t know if they’re using modern tools but the language also gets updated.
It alll comes down to budget: who wants to spend the money to modernize stuff that still works? Iss Musk willing to invest in that?
Lolololol tell that to literally every major bank, I’m sure they’ll get right on it just for you.
Yeah, great. Is DOGE going to fix any of that?
so the huge legacy codebase should be ported to…
and who’s gonna do that? You?
The terrifying answer is that script kiddies will end up porting it to JavaScript and Electron and host it on AWS.
I wanted to write JavaScript first but decided against it :D
This hasn’t been done because no one can do it. It’s because the government sucks at this stuff
It hasn’t been done because that’s a great works project that’s on a scale you’re woefully ignorant to (this is an assumption on my part based on what I can grok of you based on your comments here).
I assure you there is a bevy of skilled developers who would love to modernize the systems they work on but the cost and level of effort is beyond what is politically viable.
If you changed your perspective from “it’s awful and bad and always will be” to “it’s awful and bad and we can make it better, how can I help” things will improve for everyone.
Mate, from reading the comments of this no-brains, he or she doesn’t even know how to program in a professional capacity, much less have even the slightest clue of the scope of such a project.
That one is literally a mindless Trump/Elon fan wading into waters way, WAY, WAY beyond his depth.
I guarantee you that there are no governments, banks, or businesses older than 15 years that aren’t running some old ass code that’s not getting replaced any time soon.
tbf it’s only embarrassing if you’re capable of embarrassment.
Honestly, if you make it to 150 you deserve the money
I can’t wait for them to discover a bunch of people who are 9999 years old next.
Or supposedly received 9.223.372.036.854.775.807 dollars (64-bit max int).
In the legacy world we just call it the HIGH_DATE constant.
In my experience in the legacy world we have the isHighDate function which not only checks the constant, but also 5 other edge cases where the value isn’t HIGH_DATE but should be treated as if it is.
But but it’s BREAKING! With a red light emoji!
In before Musk says “You think the government uses COBOL?!”
Not only do many important government systems ultimately rely on or make heavy use of COBOL…
So do many older private companies.
Like banks. Account balances, transactions.
Its actually quite a serious problem that basically nobody who needs to take seriously actually does.
Basically no one is taught COBOL anymore, but a huge amount of code that undergirds much of what we consider ‘modernity’ is written in COBOL, and all the older folks that actually know COBOL are retiring.
We’re gonna hit a point where the COBOL parts of a system to be altered or maintained, and … there just isn’t anyone who actually knows how to do it.
Yeah, I’ve been tempted to try this route, but you’re really pigeonholing yourself. Even if there’s always wrk, I can’t imagine only working with cobol the rest of my career.
Even worse, the places still using this are very heavy in process, with many undocumented dependencies among many undocumented workflows and business processes. Modernizing COBOL is not a coding problem: it’s a mammoth project management, coordination, and paperwork project that also has a little bit of coding. And its not like you can write clean code, you need to write essentially the same tangled mess of accumulated changes over decades because there’s no way of knowing everything that might break
I hereby nominate you to be the new head of the SSA.
You get it, exactly.
COBOL itself is a fairly minor part of the problem, the real problem is the retiring COBOL coders are the only ones with enough institutional knowledge, broad and specific, to keep the engine from grenading and fucking wheels from coming off the car when it hits a bad enough pothole.
But management and C Suite are apparently homo superior, fully confident that none of that really matters, they’ll just keep throwing money at it until its fixed, and failing that, laying off everyone, who care in the end, they get a golden parachute when it all burns, everyone else can FOAD.
My understanding is that even if you learn COBOL, you’d struggle to understand legacy systems since they have their quirks from a bygone era
That is absolutely true as well… though this may be just a personal anecdote, it seems to me that the few COBOL coders I once knew would be amongst the most likely to keep a solid documentation of their own systems.
The problem with that though, is that their bosses are almost always too stupid to ask them for such documentation before they leave/retire, or to bother to preserve it when the exiting COBOL programmer gives it to them, because coding is magic to them, and you’re either a good magician that can do the thing, or you’re not.
Upper management / C Suite seems to never understand why the term software engineer was/is used.
I don’t think the government uses COBOL. I know the government uses COBOL.
He would dismiss COBOL and try to prove that he is a super cool geek with a deep knowledge of DnD and gaming culture. So more like:
“COBOL? Such a language doesn’t even exist unless you think Kobolds are real! Hahaha”
LMAO watch the US be saved by an inability of Muskys frat bois to understand COBOL
I dont even program and i could’ve told them it was probably a placeholder or default value lol “durrrrrr lot of people in this database were born at the exact same time on the same day in the same year that predates electronic databases, gotta be fraud!!1!1!11”
Also predates social security. It’s the long con for sure.
2016-2020 was the age of too stupid to break everything. Now we’re staring down the barrel of “The files are in the computer?” But the entire US government is the computer.
They’d probably just delete the Cobol code since “nobody would use that old stuff anyway”.
More likely they nuke it due to that lack of understanding.
As someone who is working on a project of recreating an enterprise application in a modern tech stack, the legacy code is hard to understand too.
We have something similar in that a ClaimClosedDate is defaulted to 01/01/1900 and if it has that date it means it’s not closed whereas now that would be a nullable field.
