4 ms·

How exactly would you rewrite a 10M-line codebase in a new language, without any sort of bugs? More importantly, how would you convince management to allow you

• moomin 10y ago
  That's the whole point: you shouldn't get into this situation in the first place, and the reason you did is that you've got a culture of short-termism that doesn't place enough weight on maintainability. This disaster's been 40 years in the making, and everyone thinks they made the right call. I have exactly zero solutions to this. If I did I would be rich beyond the dreams of Bezos. But let's not pretend that this isn't the end game of a short-term, low investment, low innovation culture.
  • juliangoldsmith 10y ago
    A culture of short-termism isn't the problem here. The problem is that the business rules that the code needs to implement are ridiculously complex. Keep in mind that the sort of organizations that use large Cobol systems (e.g. banks) are typically subject to very large amounts of regulation. Their code has to meet all the relevant regulations at all times, plus handle internal business rules. The laws for all of the regions a large bank works in would likely be tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. There isn't a way to condense that into a small amount of elegant code.
    • moomin 9y ago
      Well, it pretty much is. Everyone's concerned with how many eggs they're dealing with. But the basket's falling apart. It's not like we haven't already had situations where banks have found themselves completely unable to process payments for weeks at a time. And it's only going to get worse.