Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

The two groups decided to adopt a common data exchange format known as CAF (an acronym whose exact meaning was forgotten during the course of the meeting).

That line tickled my funny bone.

Having worked in insurance, this piece makes me wonder what languages are typically used to write software in insurance or other business medical type settings.

Insurance is just drowning in data and entry level claims processors have to interact with various databases all day long. Every time they update the software, they introduce new glitches.

I have a certificate in GIS, which involves some exposure to how databases work. So I was apparently more talented than average at parsing exactly what went wrong and how to get around weird new glitches.

Not really the best use for such spiffy training as I was not appreciated and would have been making vastly better money had I ever managed to get a job in GIS instead of insurance.

You need to remember that nobody really knew what software would use this data. There’s a famous quip from Eric Lander about the genome: it’s like having a dictionary for a language we don’t understand.

I think it's actually more like blueprints for a factory we don't understand. The code tells the body how to run bio fab works and we don't understand what tools will be printed and how they work and what modifications the code changes will make to the tools, the factory that builds them, etc.

It would probably be simpler if it were like a language.

> Having worked in insurance, this piece makes me wonder what languages are typically used to write software in insurance or other business medical type settings.

I'm not sure if it's different for medical insurance, but I worked with a company that did other types of insurance (mostly life with a smattering of others), and it was Java as far as the eye could see. Most things that pre-dated Java were done in COBOL.

I bet it's ftp servers exchanging csv files that are then parsed in Excel, the version from 1997, and that is the actual "database" - it's just all in excel.

„It’s excel all the way down“ is the answer to a surprisingly large number of working business solutions, from small shops to Fortune 500.

Government as well, early in the pandemic the UK gov reported inaccurate figures because they hit a bug/known-issue in excel.

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