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The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

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11–20 of 224 posts

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#11
post #5

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English.

Author has no idea what assembler is.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#12

Wow, what a cool project to work on: working out the logic flows in assembler and breaking them out so that they can be translated into a higher-level language. I've always thought that this type of government work should be open to bids from anyone . If the government is worried about trojans, malware, etc., then they can easily hire an auditor to audit the code and vouch for its authenticity. The fact that only ver…

The big trick is the proposal itself. Writing that is only possible if you are already tied in at all kinds of levels. I've seen some of these tenders up close, the companies that land the deals submit phone book sized proposals to tenders that are officially open but actually closed unless you are in a very select circle already. It's not uncommon for the proposal writer to then pass on the actual work to a whole slew of subcontractors at substantially lower rates.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#13

Wow, what a cool project to work on: working out the logic flows in assembler and breaking them out so that they can be translated into a higher-level language. I've always thought that this type of government work should be open to bids from anyone . If the government is worried about trojans, malware, etc., then they can easily hire an auditor to audit the code and vouch for its authenticity. The fact that only ver…

I would disagree. On of my first jobs was porting assembler to C for a paging switch. The assembler was well written and well documented. The task was slow, hard and painfully boring. It took months to get every function to be a perfect match.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#14

> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform…

"armies of bureaucrats doing things that could easily be automates" = "jobs for people who you owe favors but don't want to put in a position where they might screw up something important"

Elected officials have little incentive to make governing any more efficient.

Bureaucrats themselves have some incentive to be more efficient because then they can spend more of their budget at their discretion.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#15
post #4

Just imagine if this new system was converted to groovy or scala. That would be pretty amazing.

Are people writing new non-Jenkins Groovy code in 2018? What's the use case? Legitimately curious. My experience with Groovy is always frustration and I liken it to the Coffeescript of Java.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#16
post #5

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?

It's about as elegant as a mechanical watch is versus an electronic one, it has a ton of moving parts and it is a tricky thing to maintain. It's functional in that it gets the job done, I highly doubt they meant functional in the functional programming sense of the word.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#17
post #5

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. Author has no idea what assembler is.

Probably he's not a programmer?

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#18
post #5

> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?

It's about as elegant as a mechanical watch is versus an electronic one, it has a ton of moving parts and it is a tricky thing to maintain. It's functional in that it gets the job done, I highly doubt they meant functional in the functional programming sense of the word.

Ok, how about elegant? That would be the last word I'd use.

Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

#19

> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform…

> This is how it ends up with huge armies of bureaucrats doing things that could be easily automated.

Less bureaucracy and lower costs sounds like something anyone would agree on, but remember that a large part of congress has run on anti-tax promises. Hampering the efficiency of the IRS is one way of making good on that.

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