What could possibly go wrong?

I'm sure there are still people selling and supporting COBOL on modern h/w.

I think the real WTF is how they're too risk-averse to attempt a re-write but comfortable with the risk of rolling their own compiler/frontend/screenscraper.

I mostly agree with you. However, people can be a problem. No one comes out of college knowing COBOL, and COBOL is useless on a resume, so a shop that's still maintaining a COBOL app is going to have a bitch of a time getting and retaining people.

I suspect that that project truly was a WTF, but nothing in that write-up really explained why it was.
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_{ウセーバラケダ}

Something I didn't mention is that the existence of God is actually very handy when it comes to those other aspects of philosophy. You can start with a single premise, and follow that consistently through to create a big bunch of ethical and ontological conclusions.

In other words:

1. I believe there are inherent human rights.
2. Inherent human rights can only exist if there is a God^*
3. Therefore God exists.

* Note that this implies that a certain particular sort of God exists.

I'd also point out that Dawkins explicitly gives the rationalist answer to lm's and CRwM...it's the one I've been using when responding to lm in that thread. It is that things like "human rights" aren't inherent to the universe, but come from us, and are driven by our make up.

The difference between math and theology is not that math is not based on certain assumptions. Math certainly is based on certain assumptions. The difference is that math is useful in very concrete realms. Math allows physics, and physics makes your car go. If math did not do this, it'd be as much an intellectual wankfest as theology.

In other words:

Make certain assumptions in Math -> Figure out how to build an internal combustion engine.
Make certain assumptions about God -> Get to believe in "human rights".

One's a concrete, useful result. The other is merely a way of avoiding the thought of an uncaring, unthinking universe.
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_{ウセーバラケダ}

"It looked terrible and ran incredibly slow." That sounds like a negative to me.

I get where you're coming from on the rewrite, but if this is a POS system, surely that sales staff time, and the impression they give when cursing at its slowness in front of the customers, is worth real money.

The surprise to me is not so much they had a 21st century COBOL system but that they didn't attempt some sort of staged piece by piece migration.

_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}

Still pretty much stand by the main point, which was that the existence of God is an epistemological question that you can't meaningfully ask unless you have a framework to ask it in.

Yes, but be careful to not imply that any framework will do. It has to be a framework which all rational(*) people can accept.

(*) irrational people have no need for frameworks.

One think I think was kind of implicit but I maybe should have said explicitly, is that it is actually very easy to prove either the existence of God, or the non-existence of God. All you need to do is to pick the right epistemological framework to ask the question in.

No. If you're going to make a proof, it has to be accepted by other people. As such, these other people must accept your framework, which reduces the total number of frameworks to a small handful. The trouble the religionists have with people like Dawkins is that atheists don't accept their framework. So yes, they can assert things about gods, but it's just personal (or group) delusion.

An assertion about gods is valuable when it is done within a universally acknowledged framework, such as mathematics, physics, etc. Otherwise, it's just mental masturbation. But I think you acknowledge that.

Something I didn't mention is that the existence of God is actually very handy when it comes to those other aspects of philosophy. You can start with a single premise, and follow that consistently through to create a big bunch of ethical and ontological conclusions.

I don't think you can. You use god with a capital G, and I presume by that you mean one of the christian gods (but which one?). Already, that uncertainty makes it impossible for other people to arrive at any ethical or ontological conclusions, as they cannot know what properties of God you are invoking. What you're really saying is that your British upbringing among Church of England devotees has shaped your picture of "God" and you want to use that picture, which most people in the world do not share, as a shortcut in arguments. But since most people do not share that picture or even understand what it refers to, your shortcut isn't so much a shortcut as a gaping hole of logic.

So, I think lm and CRwM make very useful criticisms in the later discussion about the pure Dawkinsian argument that "there is insufficient evidence of God, so as a rational person I cannot believe it". That's fine, but if you then start saying that you believe in human rights, that mathematics is consistent, that physical laws apply uniformly across the universe, that a new-born infant has human rights but a chicken does not etc etc; then you are replacing one unprovable belief with dozens or hundreds of unprovable beliefs.

No, you're going off the deep end here. There are plenty of things that can be proved to the satisfaction of everybody. For example, I can point to a chair and prove that it is solid, by pressing on it with my hand. Anybody else in the room can verify the proof by doing likewise. There are some things which aren't easy to prove, and there are some things which can't be proven. Religious claims usually fall within the unprovable section of commonly accepted frameworks, which is what many people criticise them for.
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$E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$