[Themaintainers] Logic magazine n°11: Care

[Varun Adibhatla (ARGO)]

Hello Denis and Casey,

This article in Bloomberg
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-13/an-ancient-computer-language-is-slowing-america-s-giant-stimulus>
blames COBOL for slowing down the financial stimulus distribution across
the country.
As someone who's spent the beginning years of my technology career
programming in old languages (unix / bash in finance), I confer only
respect for these COBOL cowboys but one has to face the reality that
maintaining & transitioning from COBOL is a dirty job that very few people
want to do.

>From a resilience perspective though, this is a tough nut to crack - you're
not going to get new college grads or mid-career technologists to learn
COBOL.
It's like asking someone to learn about how to operate coal mines in a
world that is rapidly transitioning to renewable energy.
I do find the COBOL problem to be a great opportunity to create a new class
of public interest technology visa, that invites people from all over the
world to maintain aging government systems vs outsourcing it to 3rd party
firms (which unfortunately is likely what is happening) that leaves the
entire endeavor more fragile.

The US Nurse Corps <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw8a8n7ZAZg> relied on
thousands of immigrant women, predominantly from the Philippines who are
more likely than not to be on the frontlines during the pandemic.
The US Military has relied on Immigrants for years and this has also been a
pathway to expedited citizenship
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/06/military-service-was-once-fast-track-us-citizenship-trump-administration-keeps-narrowing-that-possibility/>

Finally, there is even a fantastic French movie about the story of
Zeyolo Santoko in Marly-Gomont, France <https://youtu.be/F2UZe8FNsck> that
operates on these themes.

Varun


On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 12:59 PM Casey Boardman <casey.boardman at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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