vaxman

A long time ago Apple learned that even the very best software people in industry, those top-of-class graduates from the most esteemed universities with pedigrees like "invented malloc" were stumbling at learning to program the original Macs. Before Apple acquired NeXT, reading "Inside Mac" all day and all night would not help as much as owning Steve Jasik's "THE Debugger" a fridge full of Code Red, gaining "organic knowledge" in ways that are not taught in a textbook and impossible if you are mid-career with a family. The Internet wasn't really a cheat code yet either. You couldn't hire someone to teach you such things. While this obviously was very (very!) Bad to the Sales and Marketing organizations hoping to sell more Macs (as DOS was continuing to advance into large institutions), it was awesome for the Mac bros who had that organic knowledge. But Steve returned towing NeXT and Avi's team of actual computer scientists and the deeply entrenched Boomer Mac Bros were not down with most real computer science and "sluffed off" (to become painters or whatever) like old skin. So first the mid-managers saw that shifting the platform in undocumented ways caused unproductive people to quit, then they saw that shifting the platform in documented ways caused people to quit and they thought "What an awesome way to get rid of unproductive people that you don't want around." This was great until they became so bold as to produce "The Crusty Talk" for WWDC one year and put it in terms that EEOC could begin to understand. EEOC is more about retraining the experienced workers rather than laying them off and hiring less experienced workers to learn something New. (It sounds completely crazy to people that came after the Boomers, but accept that point as fact, for now.) One can begin to imagine why that video isn't on Apple's website anymore. Back to Liquid Sluff, I mean Liquid Glass: Wasn't the whole transition to SwiftUI supposed to be about enabling the less experienced (and cheaper!) New generation (I think they are called "blue hairs" though that seems counter intuitive) to takeover from the traditional seasoned professionals building in Objective C? SwiftUI doesn't seem to have worked if they can't flip a switch at the operating system and make all the apps built with it render in "Liquid Glass" without developer intervention! Now comes the quote "they'll find themselves in a tough position" and it all makes sense...it's probably more worker sluffing.

Who cares...at this point, Apple's whole operating system is going to be reduced to an API manifest for LLMs to ingest and WWDC will probably become even more of a non-technical VC event than it already is. (Oh wait, it's. a. video.) Maybe... just maybe, someday they will start to pick winners and losers in the LLM world by messing with the API manifest just like they messed with the SDKs for the human devs over the past 50 years :D I think SEC might be faster to catch that than EEOC ever would.

Consider that back in the day, we once had a situation where the shared runtime library supporting a programming language on Megabank's PROD cluster was updated from something like 4.1.1 to 4.1.2 after months on its TEST cluster, plus lots of formal meetings, planning, pages of signatures, contingencies, extra ops people onsite, etc. --and Megabank still proceeded to loose more than ten grand per minute after pressing [Return] on that update. At least a dozen people lost their jobs at the following Friday morning meeting. It turned out that a subtle change in the vendor's implementation of a floating point function was not caught because testing didn't consider enough digits of precision. Mind you NO CODE WAS CHANGED, only a dynamically linked runtime library SUPPLIED BY THE COMPUTER MANUFACTURER --not a third party. Point being (no pun intended), when you go monkeying around with stable production systems that are doing On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP), "bad things" happen, treasure and careers are in jeopardy --and COBOL Life is all about what goes on inside of those systems.

Anthropic is great at gorilla marketing with all their PuRe BS and AI hype. Bottom line for the young peeps here:

1. There is really NO WAY IN HELL that any CIO at a credible Financial Institution will ever authorize a hallucinating chatbot to convert their core logic from COBOL to Python and Go.

2. The only way such institutions "escape" COBOL is through M&A (data --not code-- exported to the new entity's system).

3. As far as COBOL devs tapping out, that happened a very long time ago. (How many of you knew that COBOL was codeveloped by the late mathematician US Navy Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper who also invented the first compiler?) COBOL is a simple computer language from a simpler time that enabled non-tech professionals from adjacent fields (like Accounting) to become application programmers (or "implementors" in the parlance of that era). Making minor changes to COBOL code such as PIC layouts and COMPUTE statements is no big deal that requires waking up a 95 year old, the problem is strictly related to production change control (like what version of the compiler and runtimes are you using to rebuild the production binary, etc.) and that isn't even specific to COBOL, except that it is better understood with more modern languages like C (but still remains an alien concept to almost an entire generation that entered the trade after 1997 due to all of the senior level people outside of a handful of tech companies being forced to crack open their 401Ks and move on to other fields during the dot-com crash).

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