COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages

"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 still in widespread use and supports a large number of government systems, such as motor vehicle records and unemployment insurance; on any given day, it can handle something on the order of 3 trillion dollars' worth of financial transactions."

"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."

"I think of COBOL as a kind of digital asbestos, almost ubiquitous once upon a time and now incredibly, dangerously difficult to remove."

COBOL, created in 1959 to standardize business programming across different machines, became the most widely adopted computer language in history, with 80 percent of the 300 billion lines of code written by 2000 being in COBOL. The language continues to support critical government systems including unemployment insurance, motor vehicle records, and financial transactions worth trillions of dollars daily. During the COVID-19 pandemic, New Jersey's unemployment system, written in COBOL, struggled to handle surging claims due to a shortage of developers familiar with the language. Despite COBOL's documented inefficiencies costing the US GDP an estimated $105 billion in 2020, replacement efforts remain incomplete, with new systems still relying on COBOL-based mainframes as their backend infrastructure.

Read at WIRED