[Themaintainers] Logic magazine n°11: Care

[Casey Boardman]

Related, via the O'Reilly Programming Newsletter:

*The (really old) code that controls your money*
> If you guessed COBOL, you’re right. It’s ubiquitous in finance. And it’s
> hard to remove <https://link.oreilly.com/GHM0Sf00kXsrF0rW0000MQw>.


Direct link to article:
https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money

-Casey


On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 8:13 AM Denis Merigoux <denis.merigoux at inria.fr>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> 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.
>
> I sum up the story here :
> https://blog.merigoux.ovh/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.html (and
> also here in French https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02320347). 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,
> https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02936606), 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.
>
> Best,
>
> Denis Merigoux
> PhD student at Inria (French National Computer Science Research Institute)
>
> Le 13/09/2020 à 14:14, Julien Kirch a écrit :
> > Hello,
> >
> > the latest issue of Logic magazine ( https://logicmag.io/ ) is about
> Care ( https://logicmag.io/care/) 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Julien
> > _______________________________________________
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