3 ms·
Just at the time when the cohort of COBOL programmers who wrote the business logic and compliance s/w for almost all finance/fintech institutions which predate
by ggm 8mo ago
Just at the time when the cohort of COBOL programmers who wrote the business logic and compliance s/w for almost all finance/fintech institutions which predate the modern era of software, and exist as inner core "DO NOT TOUCH IT" code, are dying off.
Which to me represents both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is to take the maintenance of the "DO NOT TOUCH IT" out of the greybeards hands, before the lid goes on the coffin.
The threat is that nobody is going to be asking "we did it because we could do it, but nobody asked if we should do it" about almost any change coming down the line.
- hcs 8mo ago> The "inability to act" which, as Forrester points out, "provided the incentive" to augment or replace the low-internal-speed human organizations with computers, might in some other historical situation have been an incentive for modifying the task to be accomplished, perhaps doing away with it altogether, or for restructuring the human organizations whose inherent limitations were, after all, seen as the root of the trouble. [...] > Yes, the computer did arrive "just in time." But in time for what? In time to save--and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize--social and political structures that might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. - Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) pp 29-30