🚀 go-pugleaf

On 15 Feb 2018 22:02:39 GMT, Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>
wrote:

>On 2018-02-15, Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
>> As computers have become more powerful, we have lost certain positive
>> things we had when they were much weaker.
>
>Like knowing how not to create bloated, incomprehensible systems.
>Nowadays, good design has been replaced by brute force.
>"Who cares if it's a bubble sort?  I have a fast processor."
>The worst part is that there's now enough power to make
>payroll sytems even more convoluted than ever; it's a
>bureaucrat's wet dream but everyone else's nightmare.
>
>There are so many horror stories about hundreds of millions of dollars
>spent on computer systems that don't work.  I dream about a day when
>people get so fed up about things like not getting paid (e.g. the
>Canadian government's Phoenix payroll system, which only fulfils
>the first half of the legend by going down in flames) that the
>KISS principle will one day re-emerge.
>
>> Having those things while retaining the much greater power and economy
>> of today's computers, though, isn't an easy puzzle to solve.
>
>The worst part is that some people don't want it solved.
>See Lynn's posts about the success of failure.

Today they do ridiculous things like have a "robot" read and OCR the
entire display to figure out where a Telnet session is so that it can
then read the data off the green screen and type commands into it,
where identifying the underlying database and writing a few lines of
COBOL would likely product the same result at thousands of times the
speed.