WIRED: DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase In Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse

[Ursus Rex]

124. On a basic level, COBOL is better than Java for big math processing.

I'm also a 25-year veteran of mainframes and large-scale financial systems. At the most basic level, the precision and speed with which COBOL operates and the way you can handle numbers (not just digits per se) are two big reasons it's still widely used in the financial and business sectors. Pertinent here, another reason is that it's a sunk cost and it still works, so why spend the money to replace it with something not really any better? Also, the whole object-oriented features that Java supports aren't really a concern when the program has one job, i.e., count the money, and the inputs and outputs are thoroughly defined. The whole "it's unstable" should sound familiar to anyone who has to ask for money to continue meeting SLAs, and often has little to do with the inherent quality of the program. The *environment* - including support from programmers, etc - may be unstable, but that program on decent hardware will run for years as long as its allowed to do the one thing it was built to do. Many or even most younger programmers and managers have no idea about that, having grown up in a world where desktop and/or small server processing was their baseline. Keep in mind that Java was originally written by Sun in the 90s for networking household appliances

I suspect the main reasons they want Java include: they have libraries etc that they can repurpose; they more or less understand it, even they don't fully understand the use cases/application; they don't care about multi-digit precision; and they will get paid for development and own the codebase.