Common Business-Oriented Language

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In the late 1950s, Mary K. Hawes, a computer scientist at Burroughs Corporation, convened folks from the US Department of Defence, academia, industry, computer scientists, system users, and hardware manufacturers to the University of Pennsylvania to discuss the development of a new common business programming language.

Attendees included Grace Hopper, the inventor of the English-like data processing language FLOW-MATIC; Betty Holberton, who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer); and Jean Sammet, who would go on to develop the FORMAC programming language.

The output of their efforts to develop a common business-focused programming language was a new, not-so-creatively-named programming language called COBOL, or the Common Business-Oriented Language.

Let’s remember that they were computer scientists and not Don Draper. 

Although originally built to support systems from numerous manufacturers, by the 1990s, the majority of COBOL code ran on IBM hardware. If mainframe-based COBOL is your jam, then IBM is your best friend.

During Y2K, the criticality of COBOL code coverage came to a head. Nearly a quarter of the code that needed to be updated to account for the year 2000 was written in COBOL, with cost estimates for the effort ranging from the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars.

By the mid-2010s, most universities didn’t even teach COBOL in computer science courses, citing concerns that it was not very intellectually challenging.

Since very few universities still teach COBOL, the population of knowledgeable and capable COBOL developers is aging rapidly. As COBOL developers reach retirement age, a shortage of programmers with COBOL skills is already happening.

Estimates suggest there are only 24,000 COBOL programmers (alive) in the US. This leaves very few hands-on-keyboards to maintain these legacy systems.

Fast forward to today, and approximately 800 billion lines of COBOL are running in production in financial, insurance, transportation, and military systems. 

COBOL is still responsible for somewhere around 3 trillion dollars’ worth of transactions daily, handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US, and underpins just under half of all banking systems globally.

IBM has continued to try to push that COBOL rock up the proverbial mountain of modernization. In 2023, they announced watsonx, an AI-based code assistant for their Z mainframe hardware, built to help modernize this antique mainframe software for the cloud by refactoring COBOL code into Java.

Despite IBM’s modernization efforts, COBOL remains entrenched, even though the language has been repeatedly declared “dead” over the last seven decades.

Claude Code enters the chat.

This week, Anthropic published a blog post describing how Claude Code can now automate the exploration and analysis phases involved in COBOL modernization by mapping dependencies across thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows that nobody remembers, highlighting risks that would take human analysts months to surface, and providing software teams with the deep insights they need to make informed decisions.

By the end of the day of Anthropic’s announcement, investors had wiped roughly $40 billion from IBM’s market cap, the company’s biggest single-day drop in 25 years, sending 115-year-old IBM’s stock tumbling by 13%.

IBM’s blogging team was quick to respond.

They followed with a post of their own, highlighting that the value of IBM’s mainframe systems has nothing to do with COBOL.

IBM isn’t known for its engaging prose. Their post suggests that it has to do with what the platform is: “a purpose-built architecture from silicon through the operating system for unmatched transactional resilience, security, performance, and efficiency at scale that no other distributed environment has been able to deliver”.

Their stock has rebounded a bit in the days that followed, but the damage appears to already be done.

Maybe IBM needs to hire better bloggers.

Or maybe IBM can teach Watson to blog.

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