[Themaintainers] Logic magazine n°11: Care

[Denis Merigoux]

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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