Original link: Elon Musk’s DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL / FastCompany.
Well - if they decide to try and modernize all the US federal systems, then they will get into big problems.
We are talking billions and billions of lines of code. The oldest code is assembler and Cobol. Older code may be C or Ada. A lot of the systems are critical for the country. The task is gigantic.
Many departments has had external consultants from the worlds leading IT consulting companies to evaluate modernization approaches. Some stuff has been modernized, but a lot has not. Too expensive or too risky (most likely it was risk and not cost that prevented the modernization project from happening).