Machine Readable

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the governor of New Jersey made an unusual admission: He’d run out of COBOL developers. The state’s unemployment insurance systems were written in the 60-year-old programming language and needed to be updated…

My little theory is that the concept of “imprinting” in psychology can just as easily be applied to programming: Much as a baby goose decides that the first moving life-form it encounters is its parent, embryonic programmers form…