All posts tagged: COBOL

COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages

COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages

Published by skeptic

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 to handle the hundreds of thousands of claims. Trouble was, few of the state’s employees knew how to do that. And the crisis went beyond New Jersey, just one of many states that depended on these unwieldy systems. By one rough calculation, COBOL’s inefficiencies cost the US GDP $105 billion in 2020. You might think New Jersey would have replaced its system after this—and that Covid was COBOL’s last gasp. Not quite. The state’s new unemployment system came with a number of quality-of-life improvements, but on the backend, it was still made possible by a mainframe running the ancient language. COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is the most widely adopted computer language in history. Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL. It’s …

IBM’s B stock wipeout is built on a misconception: Translating COBOL isn’t the same as modernizing it

IBM’s $40B stock wipeout is built on a misconception: Translating COBOL isn’t the same as modernizing it

Published by skeptic

On Tuesday, Anthropic published tools that let Claude read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. By the end of the trading day, investors had wiped roughly $40 billion from IBM’s market cap — the company’s biggest single-day drop in 25 years — pricing the announcement as an existential threat to IBM’s mainframe business. The reaction was swift. It was also built on a fundamental misreading of why enterprises run mainframes in the first place. IBM’s COBOL is 66 years old. It was designed in 1959, runs on IBM mainframes, and continues to power transaction processing systems with an estimated 250 billion lines of COBOL in active production, according to the Open Mainframe Project. The engineers who wrote it are retiring; the ones replacing them largely cannot read it. For decades, that skills gap has been one of enterprise IT’s most expensive unsolved problems — and one IBM has been working to fix with AI since at least 2023, when it launched watsonx Code Assistant for Z to help migrate …

IBM posts steepest daily drop since 2000 after Anthropic says AI can modernize COBOL

IBM posts steepest daily drop since 2000 after Anthropic says AI can modernize COBOL

Published by Sam Flores

Feb 23 : Shares of International Business Machines recorded their steepest daily drop in more than 25 years on Monday, after AI startup Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize a programming language run on IBM systems. IBM shares sank 13.2 per cent, their biggest drop since October 18, 2000. COBOL is a programming language widely used on IBM mainframes across banking, insurance and government systems. “Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows. Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization,” Anthropic said in a blog post on Monday. “With AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years,” it added. Software stocks have been battered in recent months by market fears around the growing capabilities of AI tools, particularly following the launch of plug-ins from Anthropic’s large language model Claude, seen as the startup’s push to become an application layer. Shares of cybersecurity companies including CrowdStrike and Datadog also …