Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter:
CRISIS COMPUTING: THE FRICTIONS OF GLOBAL FLOWS
Lecture for the KUNO express course, March 19, 2024
Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter: Spaces of Flaws of Flows: COBOL and the back-back-ends of development, in: Computational Culture—a journal of software studeies
how can we talk about our current concerns of our present and how is the past embedded in the future ... all these discussions ...
a picture of the engineer
it has people oriented design, to be as close to human language as possible -- she wanted everbody to be able to read and write and understand it
through these third-generation high level languages, programming becomes really something new -- from being situated and located on machines it becomes indestructably and globally applicable in universal space and time
COBOL programms are automatically coordinating, distributing and displacing goods, people and money through the excecution, in a was as enforcement of absolute space as it expands within globalisation -- it is performing the global flows, at least in theory
Robert Swirsky: How my COBOL code ended up in the orignal Terminator movie
execution is commonly defined as an act carrying into effect, it also brings associations of death, of punishment, killings in accordance with the law and is regarded essential to power and command. and code has often been regarded as manifesting such power, as performative speech act --- but Schwarzenegger's trouble with COBOL implies that code and commanding is actually not doing what it says.....
Alexander Galloway: Playing the Code
the one who executes is seldom the one deciding --- between the order and the actual execution lies the sort of space of possibilities, of miscommunication, of negotiation, of disobedience ...
Interview with Jerome Garfunkel
.... including the Danish tax authority, the German pension system, the Swedish social insurance agency, and UK's department for work and pension ...
... and the active lines of code are actually increasing, which is indicating that it is a living language, but still, COBOL is not part of any curriculum in computer sciences, neither in the global North but also not in global South, it's never used to develop a new programme
the lines of COBOL are increasing because of maintenance --- code in the limbo between being key and super crucial to business but also completely outmode -- in other words: it's a living dead, a kind of zombie
