Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
Why is there a need to rewrite it at all? Is it because COBOL is basically ancient hieroglyphics to modern programmers thus making it hard to maintain or update?
Refactoring a code base is kinda like general maintenance for the application. Over time deprecated features, temp fixes, etc. start to be a lot of the code base. By cleaning things up you can make it more maintainable, efficient, etc.
That being said, for systems this large you usually fix up parts of it and iterate over time. Trying to do the whole code base is hard cause it’s like replacing the engine while the car is in motion.
Why is there a need to rewrite it at all? Is it because COBOL is basically ancient hieroglyphics to modern programmers thus making it hard to maintain or update?
Refactoring a code base is kinda like general maintenance for the application. Over time deprecated features, temp fixes, etc. start to be a lot of the code base. By cleaning things up you can make it more maintainable, efficient, etc.
That being said, for systems this large you usually fix up parts of it and iterate over time. Trying to do the whole code base is hard cause it’s like replacing the engine while the car is in motion.