4 ms·
Yeah its kinda scary. People meme it but so much of the modern world relies on an aging stock of retiree's to come in on contract and do a thing then leave to b
by breakfastduck 4y ago
Yeah its kinda scary. People meme it but so much of the modern world relies on an aging stock of retiree's to come in on contract and do a thing then leave to be sustainable.
It's not the amount of stuff that runs COBOL thats a problem, it's how critical that infrastructure is to human society - I don't think that's an overstatement.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago> it's how critical that infrastructure is to human society Exactly, and the regression horror stories I hear are unbelievable because these codebases are so old. A while back, a major customer of this processor transmitted a payment reconciliation file that had bad headers in it and brought down the entire reconciliation system (billions of dollars a day flow through this platform). No basic input validation, no escape hatch for corrupted files, nothing. I couldn't believe it when I heard the story. The crazy part was how long it would take to harden the system against bad input like that because a lot of that code was written 20-30 years ago. People working in modern systems think they know tech debt...