Tag Archives: cobol

What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for… Read More »

IBM’s generative AI tool aims to refactor ancient COBOL code for its mainframes

Enlarge / COBOL 73, as seen (inside Windows) in the IRS’s Austin, Texas, offices in 2022. Washington Post / Getty Images reader comments 79 with There are hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code running on production systems worldwide. That’s not ideal for a language over 60 years old and whose primary architects are… Read More »