Hot takes about Cobol are overlooking the fact that this is sustainable software - sure, there is a developer shortage when systems require rapid changes, and scaling is challenging with contemporary cloud-based infrastructure... but these languages are running huge swaths of

our world's digital infrastructure - banks, climate models, and most of gov tech run on cobol and fortran.

As someone who studies software sustainability, I deeply appreciate people who wrote code DECADES ago and it still works.

Most of us can't even compile software written ~5 years ago for our dissertations. Most of us don't know how to write something that will scale to hundreds of thousands of users without vast amounts of money and time for maintenance. Public sector software is a case study in

sustainability. Yes, it has many inefficiencies and those have real world (many times awful) consequences for individuals that need rapid response. See @PopTechWorks on how disastrous these consequences are when we privilege new efficiencies over tested and working systems.

Outdated public digital infrastructure is OUR problem and Our fault. Its a symptom of talented publicly educated people being incentivized to seek marketplace profit rather than societal benefit... It's letting all of the talented programmers who go to

the private sector, and all of the elected officials that continuously neglect our public digital infrastructure off the hook. I don't begrudge anyone who wants to make a living for their families. But, those of you joking about Cobol developers need to go join a civictech meetup

in your city. You will find dedicated, smart, passionate people seeking change within understaffed and poorly funded municipal governments. These people and the ones that came before them have been doing the invisible labor of keeping systems like this alive. For decades.

They don't have fully stocked kitchens that let them work all hours of the day uninterrupted. They are woefully underpaid. They don't have shiny new macbooks and $300 mechanical keyboards.

They don't often have access to and knowledge of many cloud infrastructures because the public technology procurement process is deeply broken, and the regulatory environment that they are forced to navigate requires imperfect, and often outdated proprietary workarounds

These people are public servants and heroes. Saying anything less right now is purely self-preservation for a group of you that haven't been doing anything nearly as hard, or frankly as important.