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> These government systems by necessity are not very complex, because the hardware at the time did not have capacity for anything too complex. This is possibl

> These government systems by necessity are not very complex, because the hardware at the time did not have capacity for anything too complex. This is possibly one of the most absurd takes I've read on HN in a while. I'm imagining someone trying to learn how a PC game programmed in Assembly works going 'how hard could it be, PCs in the 90s weren't that complex'

ronbenton 2y ago
I'm always interested in hearing people out, but these legacy COBOL codebases are massive, complex behemoths. Certainly eyebrow-raising to hear someone say they are not complex.
- winocm 2y ago
  Don't forget F77 codebases too.
- dpc_01234 2y ago
  "Massive", "behemoths". The same words you'll hear when you ask a man about their manhood, or their biggest catch. First hand source, so must be true. I also trust government workers to give fair representation of their work. And what you SWE write on their resumes or what OKRs when filling time to justify paycheck. :D They're a couple of database "tables" and formulas, what else they would supposed to be, think about it. They might be archaic, they might gnarly, limited etc. but they are no match for a modern next.js with react, in a docker container on a VM, running in a AWS datacenter, managed by Terraform, yadaydayda...
  - strangecasts 2y ago
    They're not complex in the Big O sense, they are complex systems in the sense that they have to incorporate and reconcile organizational knowledge from very different domains - e.g. Ron Jeffries' "Why Is Payroll Hard" http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard - while working in a predictable fashion with implicit requirements on availability and consistency, which the average web app stack more often than not leaves as "someone else's problem"
dpc_01234 2y ago
As someone that actually wrote some assembly, including graphics in the 90s, I assure you that these games were waaaaay simpler than anything modern, also by necessity.

ronbenton 2y ago

I'm always interested in hearing people out, but these legacy COBOL codebases are massive, complex behemoths. Certainly eyebrow-raising to hear someone say they are not complex.

winocm 2y ago
Don't forget F77 codebases too.
dpc_01234 2y ago
"Massive", "behemoths". The same words you'll hear when you ask a man about their manhood, or their biggest catch. First hand source, so must be true. I also trust government workers to give fair representation of their work. And what you SWE write on their resumes or what OKRs when filling time to justify paycheck. :D They're a couple of database "tables" and formulas, what else they would supposed to be, think about it. They might be archaic, they might gnarly, limited etc. but they are no match for a modern next.js with react, in a docker container on a VM, running in a AWS datacenter, managed by Terraform, yadaydayda...
- strangecasts 2y ago
  They're not complex in the Big O sense, they are complex systems in the sense that they have to incorporate and reconcile organizational knowledge from very different domains - e.g. Ron Jeffries' "Why Is Payroll Hard" http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard - while working in a predictable fashion with implicit requirements on availability and consistency, which the average web app stack more often than not leaves as "someone else's problem"

dpc_01234 2y ago

As someone that actually wrote some assembly, including graphics in the 90s, I assure you that these games were waaaaay simpler than anything modern, also by necessity.