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> Fun (scary) fact – significant portions of the IRS tax system is still written in assembly. It's basically the original codebase plus 40 years of additions an
by Lionsion 8y ago
> Fun (scary) fact – significant portions of the IRS tax system is still written in assembly. It's basically the original codebase plus 40 years of additions and patches as the tax code changed.
> They were working on projects to "elevate" it to Java, because it's pretty difficult to maintain it as-is.
Yeah, apparently an eight person IRS development team nearly developed a replacement, but the main developers were hired on a special program to pay them at above-GSA rates, and that program expired before they could put it into production:
https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/irs-clutches-its-modernization-holy-grail/ https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir...
- rbanffy 8y agoCouldn't they open-source it? I assume finishing it would be relatively quick and a lot of comp-sci graduates would love to have the chance to play with IRS systems.
- candreasen 8y agoI'm guessing that would scare the crap out of the masses. Security by obscurity may not work but if there ever were a glitch or breach it sure does look bad to say "and they knew about the bug because we made our codebase public"
- Jach 8y agoI don't think you could spin it that way. "The popular media can only handle ideas expressible in proto-language, not ideas requiring nested phrase-structure syntax for their exposition." Though maybe a better reason is that there doesn't seem to have been any such spin on big open source issues (such as Heartbleed) of the recent past. Why would they spin it as an open source problem rather than say a government/contractor competence problem (or something else) in the IRS case?