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Comment by newprint | Hacker News Reader

Just put the entire COBOL source code on the github and let us rework it in the Java or C# and be done with this abomination.

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Verifying the equivalence of two large programs can be very difficult. Developers often underestimate the effort needed to achieve a correct rewrite.

Exactly and figuring out all the logic with code that's been refined and built out of 20-30 years.

Any developer saying, "Hey, go and rewrite the code" underestimate all the edge cases that end up all over the place in the application.

These red-tape based systems are 80% corner cases, exceptions and special cases. The business “logic” resembles geological strata.

Nobody understands why the rules are the way they are - but if someone gets paid $1 less they'll be screaming at you.

Surely, you'd need to understand COBOL to translate it first?

Not a bad idea for the long term. It should all be Open Source if it's running a public service. Right?

https://publiccode.eu/

If I were doing financial stuff, I'd probably use a language with a better type system than Java or C#

Like what?

Anything to the right of Rust on the type safety spectrum... F#, OCaml, Haskell, etc. Compile-time guarantees of runtime type safety are :100: when dealing with money and other critical things.

Search for "jane street ocaml" and "standard chartered haskell" for examples of companies using languages with good type systems in financial code.

You might want to read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636029 if you haven't seen it before...

Or just put it on github... might find people interested in helping without a full rewrite.

There’s a staggering amount of hubris in this notion...

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