<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Related, via the O'Reilly Programming Newsletter:<div><br></div><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><b>The (really old) code that controls your money</b><br>If you guessed <span class="gmail-il">COBOL</span>, you’re right. It’s ubiquitous in finance. <a href="https://link.oreilly.com/GHM0Sf00kXsrF0rW0000MQw" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(238,0,0)">And it’s hard to remove</a>. </blockquote><div><br></div><div>Direct link to article: <a href="https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money">https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money</a></div><div><br></div><div>-Casey</div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 8:13 AM Denis Merigoux <<a href="mailto:denis.merigoux@inria.fr">denis.merigoux@inria.fr</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Hi everyone,<br>
<br>
To follow up on this topic on maintaining old systems from the public sector, I can share my experience with the French income tax computation system. It's not written in COBOL but in a proprietary Domain Specific Language called "M" and used only by this system. Eventually, I retro-engineered a compiler for their language that turned out to be way better than the one they already had, and they'll maybe switch at some point.<br>
<br>
I sum up the story here : <a href="https://blog.merigoux.ovh/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.html" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://blog.merigoux.ovh/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.html</a> (and also here in French <a href="https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02320347" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02320347</a>). This experience led me to wonder whether the situation for what I call "legal expert systems" responsible for tax computations around the world are soundly maintained. In this article (pre-print version at this stage, <a href="https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02936606" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02936606</a>), I propose a new method for designing these systems in a way that preserves their ability to be maintained and kept correctly in sync with the legislation changes.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Denis Merigoux<br>
PhD student at Inria (French National Computer Science Research Institute)<br>
<br>
Le 13/09/2020 à 14:14, Julien Kirch a écrit :<br>
> Hello,<br>
><br>
> the latest issue of Logic magazine ( <a href="https://logicmag.io/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://logicmag.io/</a> ) is about Care ( <a href="https://logicmag.io/care/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://logicmag.io/care/</a>) and "looks at technologies that are changing how we give and receive care—and the care that our machines themselves need", and several articles are maintenance-related and may be relevant to this list.<br>
><br>
> One article is about a single person that created the Veterans Appeals System for US government and maintained it alone since more than 20 years, and he waits that the people that work on a replacement system to finish it to be able to retire.<br>
><br>
> Several articles are about maintaining Cobol systems, discussing how the technology has been used as a scapegoat to hide the effects of management and loss of knowledge when some of these systems failed during the pandemic this year.<br>
><br>
> For me linking software maintenance with the effects of sofware in the same "care" category was an interesting way to open new questions about tech practices.<br>
><br>
> Thanks<br>
><br>
> Julien<br>
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