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Its not the flashiest language, but I think its the right choice for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
>assembler-to-Java project Where's my gif of that guy who looks skeptically at that thing he's looking at? You know that one.
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 sl…
I know a handful of small players, myself included who have won IT contracts with the gov't and it is not at all like you stated.
The best argument to new development is working code. I assume that they can't hire people to upgrade or maintain Maniframe software anymore.
> 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?
I've always thought the formatting kind of lends itself to a little bit of visual elegance. Since its always 1 instruction per line, various instruction fields tend to line up nicely. But yeah I don't see how it is elegant in any way that's useful
This is similar to high-level languages like Lisp and Prolog, whose code is readily represented by built-in data structures in the respective language.
A fun fact about this is that extremely low-level (like assembly) and extremely high-level (like Prolog) languages are homoiconic, but there is a large gap "in the middle" (like Java, C), where there are many languages that lack this property.
Funny how it's always the same companies producing code for the government based on political relationships - but the outcome of government software is always so bad.
If anyone could land a contract just because a senator owed them a favor you'd see a lot more diversity in who the government does business with.
Java seems like a good choice for the IRS. There are legions and legions of programmers well versed in Java, since its among the most commonly used programming languages to introduce programming at universities. This means the IRS should be able to focus its hiring on "People who know tax law and can use Java" instead of "Java experts that know enough tax law to be dangerous". Its not the flashiest language, but I th…
FTFY
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This is not a partisan issue. Both parties have a long history of meddling with the IRS and generally making things worse.
