Some of you may remember waaaay back during the Before Time when a secret ally of democracy suddenly revealed itself to put a hurt on a Republican trying to do mischief.
The year was 2010.
The Republican was Ahnuld Schwarzenegger, who, believe it or not kids, for a minute was actually governor of Galivornia (official pronunciation during his tenure in that oviz.)
And the secret ally of democracy was...COBOL! Yay! My very own programming mother tongue!
Like the the Dead Men of Dunharrow, summoned by the last King of Gondor to turn the Battle of the Corsairs in The Return of the King, COBOL emerged from its hiding place to frustrate Ahnuld's plan to screw over government employees.
Twice!
I wrote about the Guvinator barking out his empty orders "zee bayroll zizdem being vixed now! Now! Now! And zo fort" here and we did a podcast about it here.
And now from the rotting carcass of the Party of Lincoln, a new and vastly more destructive villain has emerged. One who is attempting to bypass laws and courts by dispatching his Aqua Teen Incel Fascist Force to seize direct control of the government payroll system and cut off funding to whoever offends him.
And once again, Grace Hopper's Ghost Army of ten million lines of ancient B-XOR, END-INVOKE and 88-level number code -- some of which was probably last updated and compiled during the Carter administration -- have emerged from the shadows to kick Musk's Shitler Youth in their hairless yam sacks like an angry Mayan Codex with a black belt in taekwondo.
H/T to alert listener Ravi for passing this along. From Paul Krugman:
The 20-somethings Musk is deploying to take over, locking out those old hands and pushing aside the people who know how the system works, almost surely don’t understand enough to politicize payments right away.
As Nathan Tankus, the go-to expert on these matters, says,
I 100% believe that the primary barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL.
For readers mystified by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once pervasive in the business world but in which hardly anyone under 60 knows how to program — yet is still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey put out a frantic call for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)
So raise a glass to the inventor of COBOL -- navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper [December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992] -- was, by all accounts, a perfectly nice, brilliant nerd*, the likes of whom we could sure use more of these days, and exactly the sort of hero Tosspot Pete Hegseth would have run out of the Navy.
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