Good post Steve :^) I was reading the GAO report already back in May,
very interesting. Scaringly enough all rethoric goes bashing what's
old, a myopic prerogative of the startup-innovation-hype. Very
surprising to see there is no critical voice in the debate.

I'm afraid these ICT shills will advocate to trust more nopejs
scripting presented as code (or all sorts of similar prototypes sold
as products) regardless of all re/liability aspects connected.

On Wed, 03 Aug 2016, Steve Litt wrote:

> If the government needs pretty-gui for the untrainable minimum wage
> workers they hire, they could make a command driven front end to the
> Cobol that presents the Cobol program as a pretty GUI. A lot better
> to leave the core as Cobol rather than risk some boze intermixing
> algorithm and presentation, and that happens all the time.

I very much agree with this. There are many things that can be done by
rewriting interpreters yet leaving the same logic behind. IMHO we
should have less ruptures and more continuity, but it seems the
'Singularity' idea of having disruption all the time is much more
sexy, I'm not sure we should blame the Silicon Valley for that, but
I'm pretty sure its keeping as many lawyers busy as young coders
already, with plenty of desasters on record.

I had a very interesting conversation about all this once with an
engineer at FermiLab. I really hope for the USA the mission critical
infrastructure doesn't get bought too early into the hype. Meanwhile
there are so many more mission critical things getting automated...

ciao