The number of hits for #COBOL everywhere is going up fast! My GOOGLE Alerts email for today has a record high of five hits! One of them is for something on Wonkette; I couldn’t find the bit about COBOL but there we are. One was for a Korean company announcing their AI plan to convert COBOL to whatever. The rest are generally DOGE/Musk reactions.

The COBOL replacement industry is at least 50 years old. AI is the latest buzzword compliant solution. There is a small matter of a quarter of a trillion to over three quarters of a trillion lines of idiomatic COBOL is a lot of hard to read code. There are lots of tombstones in that work already.

HINT: If, for some reason, the IT Punditry community decided that C is too old and had to be replaced … oh wait a minute, the Rust community is in the midst of trying to pull that off. But do we hear a drumbeat about AI converting all the C code? Not so much.

COBOL only looks easy to convert because it LOOKS LIKE prose English. It’s not!

Some common sense

The attention-seeking reactions to the SSA thing reminded me of Mely Lerman’s recent story on LinkedIn: What to do if CEO asks you about COBOL. It’s a good summary of the state of the game.