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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

> In France, income tax is computed from taxpayers' individual returns, using an algorithm that is authored, designed and maintained by the French Public Finances Directorate (DGFiP). This algorithm relies on a legacy custom language and compiler originally designed in 1990, which unlike French wine, did not age well with time.

This interesting. When it comes to legacy code we think of COBOL and FORTRAN most of the time, but probably there is a huge amount of even more exotic code out there that does its duty day in day out.

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In my country, with an admittedly quite simple tax code, the authorities used to publish each year official COBOL code that computed income tax.

They switched to Java in 2018-ish - and to Github instead of a random FTP server.

Doing your taxes has also been a no-op for many people the past decade or so. You don't do anything except read the tax report, unless you spot some mistakes or items missing in the report that was autofilled by the government, then you can go into the web form and submit the amendments necessary.

Cool - which country? Could you link to the Github repo?

I’m guessing it’s Estonia. It’s really ahead with digital governance.

Estonian here - no it is not Estonia.

Here our income tax declaration is very simple, the tax office already knows how much salary we have earned, and there aren't many deductions, so most people either don't have to file taxes at all, or just click next a few times and get their tax returns after a week or so. For 90% of people it takes less than 5 minutes.

I think it's Norway.

(I just googled GP's email address (it's in their profile).)

Yeah, it's Norway.

https://github.com/Skatteetaten/trekktabell

How can you tell? All "Languages" I get is "Java 100.0%".

The COBOL part is from memory. I'll have a look to see if I can find a copy floating around somewhere.

Edit: the transition appears to be more like 2016, and one of the commits then refers to a file generated from COBOL: https://github.com/Skatteetaten/trekktabell/commit/5181d86c5...

I did find an awkward source that lists the 2017(?) COBOL code for the tables - the core program seems to be last updated 1993 (Norwegian only) : https://docplayer.me/38761458-Beregning-av-forskuddstrekk-in...

> IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.  PROGRAM-ID. FT7P200T. AUTHOR. PER J. RISTUN. DATE-WRITTEN. NOVEMBER 1993 ----------------------------------------------------------------  * BESKRIVELSE : PROGRAMMET BEREGNER FORSKUDDSTREKK FOR ÅR 2017 * (...)

This is the one!

If memory serves, they updated the program for each year (I guess only numerical constants and small rule changes), but they probably didn't update the source in the documentation.

That sounds amazing. Which country is it?

That's genius.

A buddy of mine retired rich after creating property tax administration systems. They only had a few client counties.

They'd just about rollout new system updates before the next wave of tax code revisions. Never ending work.

Sounded like living hell. I couldn't do that kind of work and stay sane. But he seemed to enjoy it.

Recently helped my dad clear out his office - and we came across a binder with fan-folded, faded dot matrix printed copy of COBOL code he used in order to calculate taxes in the 80s - translating the code to BASIC. The original COBOL code came from the Norwegian tax office - I'm not sure if they still publish something similar.

Ed: ah, same country https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25210009

A little unfortunate that we threw it out.

In Belgium, calculation of the pensions was done in a mix of BS2000 assembly language and COBOL until at least 2007, when they entered a race to switch to Java before the last of the original developers retired.

I worked for an org that tried to modernize, again, their mainframe legacy code, and failed.

I always thought it'd be easier to use an emulator and keep using the old stuff. Then over time whittle the code base down to just the business logic.

So you think they still had a 1970s mainframe ? No: Siemens themselves replaced it with an x84 based emulator in the 90s (which ran on a desktop machine).

My entire industry (subset of healthcare) mostly uses a single application for 95% of our core business functions. That application is written in Visual FoxPro and is, predictably, pretty terrible. Obviously it isn't going to get better, either, but it'll be a decade or more before there's a serious competitor.

I'm not near the space any longer (in a former life, the healthcare industry was a big customer of our computer systems). But a significant portion of healthcare in the US used to use a proprietary language called MUMPS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

Epic has been trying to move on for years, or so a recruiter told me half a decade ago. Their job posting now describes “Using leading-edge technologies and languages like JS, TS, and C#”, though I wouldn’t put a bait and switch past them.

MEDITECH, maybe others, had a proprietary operating system too. (We had a special deal to sell them hardware without an OS at a time when they were normally bundled.) Eventually they moved on to NT.

Yeah, well, they have a thing called TS2M, referred to e.g. here... https://www.reddit.com/r/epicsystems/comments/9pmsjj/ts2m_in...

MUMPS is quite popular in finance, mostly through Cache product.

Including for new developments.

Hah I’m also working in healthcare and we also use Visual FoxPro for storing data. Luckily most of the Visual FoxPro UI is gone.

We have it right here. Hacker News is written in the Arc programming language, which was developed by Paul Graham and Robert Morris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

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