I posted the following comment to this article (currently awaiting moderation):
You stepped right onto one of my pet-peeves, so as calmly as I can, I'd like to explain why the whole Y2K bug turned out to be a non-event: because a lot of people -- myself included -- spent months poring over countless lines of, yes, COBOL (among others), and writing in year-windowing functions and the like.
In 1999, I was working for a large, affluent public school district in the East Bay in California. We had a Unisys mainframe -- and to the best of my knowledge, they're still running most of their stuff on it -- that was responsible for their accounting, their finance, their payroll, and all of their school operations.
If it only weighed in at a million lines of COBOL, I would be surprised.
And layered on top of that were, probably, tens of thousands of lines of WFL.
We spent months auditing (and patching) all of the functions in that systems.
When all was said and done, only a few unanticipated systems broke in the months following January 1, 2000.
However, had we not done all that work, I can assure you that nobody would have received a paycheck in January.
The people that always point to the end results of the Y2K bug as an example of unfounded hype bug me to no end. Have you even ever talked to someone that did Y2K work? I did, and it was not a picnic, and yes, a lot of things would have been broken if we hadn't done it. (Hell, there was even a critical patch for Sun DNS servers that had to be applied; I know this, because I applied it, and fought it with as it didn't work out quite right.)
As for 200 billion SLOC for COBOL ... yes, that seems a bit high, but I don't honestly think it's off by an order of magnitude. We were a little tiny system by lots of standards, and we were running easily a million lines of COBOL, and a huge chunk of it was custom code and in-house patches.
I think you're a bit backward on Y2K; instead of being down on those who correctly said that the hypsters were full of it, you should be irritated at the hypsters who were effectively claiming that you and the other programmers who patched the problems before they became problems were too incompetent to do your jobs.
That's not the sense I get in most discussions like this, although I hadn't thought of it that way before so it's possible that I'm letting my own biases come into play here.
The sense I get is that the Y2K bug was a non-issue to begin with -- the usual evidence for this being that there were very few problems following January 1 -- which I think really marginalizes the huge amount of extra effort that a lot of people put into making sure that it would be a non-issue.
_If_ legions of programmers hadn't done their jobs, and done them very well, then the hypsters probably wouldn't have been very far off the mark.
You stepped right onto one of my pet-peeves, so as calmly as I can, I'd like to explain why the whole Y2K bug turned out to be a non-event: because a lot of people -- myself included -- spent months poring over countless lines of, yes, COBOL (among others), and writing in year-windowing functions and the like.
In 1999, I was working for a large, affluent public school district in the East Bay in California. We had a Unisys mainframe -- and to the best of my knowledge, they're still running most of their stuff on it -- that was responsible for their accounting, their finance, their payroll, and all of their school operations.
If it only weighed in at a million lines of COBOL, I would be surprised.
And layered on top of that were, probably, tens of thousands of lines of WFL.
We spent months auditing (and patching) all of the functions in that systems.
When all was said and done, only a few unanticipated systems broke in the months following January 1, 2000.
However, had we not done all that work, I can assure you that nobody would have received a paycheck in January.
The people that always point to the end results of the Y2K bug as an example of unfounded hype bug me to no end. Have you even ever talked to someone that did Y2K work? I did, and it was not a picnic, and yes, a lot of things would have been broken if we hadn't done it. (Hell, there was even a critical patch for Sun DNS servers that had to be applied; I know this, because I applied it, and fought it with as it didn't work out quite right.)
As for 200 billion SLOC for COBOL ... yes, that seems a bit high, but I don't honestly think it's off by an order of magnitude. We were a little tiny system by lots of standards, and we were running easily a million lines of COBOL, and a huge chunk of it was custom code and in-house patches.