from here: https://bsky.app/profile/lcamtuf.coredump.cx/post/3lm6dgvi4uc27

…but after decades of Republicans trying and failing to get rid of Social Security with legislation, they’ve finally figured out that One Weird Trick to getting rid of Social Security: an ill-conceived attempt to modernize the software by trying a rushed migration away from a code base that is literally over half a century old. Hope you weren’t relying on Social Security for your retirement!

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/

Hey legends,

I designed this t-shirt as a small tribute to the backbone of legacy systems — you. While everyone’s chasing the next shiny framework, you're out here keeping banks, governments, and airlines from collapsing into chaos.

This one's for the developers who never really left, because that mainframe isn't going to debug itself.

"COBOL Devs Never Die — They Just Get Re-Contracted"

Check it out here: https://404swagnotfound.com/products/cobol-devs-never-die

Would love your feedback or suggestions for future legacy-themed drops!

So I had a friendly argument with a fellow IT guy and friend on whether or not COBOL can be used to write a webserver.

I'm not a particularly good programmer, or not a programmer at all, but COBOL has nice documentation, I enjoy developing software as close to the bare metal as possible, and for everything else I used a large language model, mostly for checking syntax errors, and obvious mistakes, and to organize the code.

I really love the pure ancient, punchard-era aesthetics of this programming language, and tried my best to replicate the spirit of the era with the comments in the source code.

Mod it 'til you break it. Enjoy!

EDIT: renamed the repo to cobweb by the suggestion of u/ntropia64
https://github.com/majormilan/cobweb

Thea Loch, head of digital payments at Lloyds and another Finnovate panelist, said COBOL's days at the bank might finally be numbered; she said that the bank has "started the journey, finally," of getting rid of COBOL. Speaking optimistically, she said "maybe in ten years' time, we'll no longer be talking about this."

Banks will "maybe" be done with COBOL... in ten years

So, what do you guys think?

Elon needs to brush up on his legacy COBOL skills? He's claiming that social security has people collecting benefits that are 150 years old, pointing to fraud in the system. Actually, this all appears to be based on how some legacy COBOL systems stored dates, where the field happens to be blank because of incomplete data entry or other mistakes.

In the COBOL programming language, missing dates used to be stored as specifically, May 20, 1875 (which I think is the zero-point, or at least was). This stems from the ISO 8601:2004 standard, which fixed this date as a reference point due to its significance - the signing of the Metre Convention. However, this was later changed by the ISO 8601-1:2019 standard. So it's not an inherent thing in the COBOL language, but did happen for that range of years. The data (or lack thereof) lives on... People trained in COBOL are supposed to recognize this specific date as likely an error condition, is what I’m told.

Note that Elon does not appear to make claims that there are 149 year olds, 145 year olds, etc. These fraudulent recepients are all exactly 150 years old. I smell a lack of education myself. That's my tentative judgement anyway. Thoughts?

Edit: I retract what I said about default dates given the details that have surfaced here and elsewhere since I wrote the post, I thank everyone for their comments.

I'm unconvinced these records represent fraud. I think it's errors in the SS database. The errors might be more extensive than age too (that's why SS encourages you to regularly review your earnings history). It's also not clear that anybody "claiming" to be 150 years old for example, actually receives benefits. There's a lot more than age involved here.

Hi, I'm new here. I've been learning COBOL for just a day, and it has been great so far. It's so easy to migrate from, let's say, a "real software engineering" language like C++ to COBOL because of how simple it is (it's really close to pseudo-code!). In most languages, I'm forced to deal with all the quirks they have. But here, I'm not even forced to deal with the boilerplate, just let it exist and focus on my program's algorithm. Abstractions have not been an issue here, as if they never existed at all. The language is so strong and bold that I don't feel suck writing it.

I can easily convert these C++ functions to solve the same linear equations:

static std::optional<double> solve_1v(double a, double b)
{
  if (a == 0.0)
    return std::nullopt;
  return -b / a;
}

static std::optional<std::pair<double, double>>
solve_2v(double a1, double b1, double c1, double a2, double b2, double c2)
{
  double det = a1 * b2 - a2 * b1;
  if (det == 0.0)
    return std::nullopt;

  double x = (c1 * b2 - c2 * b1) / det;
  double y = (a1 * c2 - a2 * c1) / det;
  return std::make_pair(x, y);
}

To COBOL without all of the stupid syntax:

SOLVE-1V.
           COMPUTE 1V-X = -(1V-B) / 1V-A.
SOLVE-2V.
           COMPUTE 2V-DET =  ((2V-A1 * 2V-B2) -  2V-A2 * 2V-B1)

           IF 2V-DET = 0
               MOVE 1 TO 2V-NO-SOL
           ELSE
               MOVE 0 TO 2V-NO-SOL
               COMPUTE 2V-X =
                   (2V-C1 * 2V-B2) -  (2V-C2 * 2V-B1) / 2V-DET
               COMPUTE 2V-Y =
                   (2V-A1 * 2V-C2) -  (2V-A2 * 2V-C1) / 2V-DET
           END-IF.

And, by just looking and comparing the two, I really want to stick with the latter one. Sure, C++ has its power for other needs, like memory management. But, imagine trying to achieve a scientific calculation, yet you have to care about how well you write so that your code doesn't suck and cause some "undefined behaviors" as if it's not the language's fault in the first place. And so you have to spend night after night dealing with your code instead of your real problem. Personally? I don't like that at all. Even in simpler languages like Python, there are still abstractions that are not related to your problem that you just don't want to deal with. Which is why I picked COBOL as a new language to learn (besides the issues about the "crisis of COBOL engineers." I really want to fit into that position, hehe).

I'm currently starting young (still in junior high school), and right now I'm having troubles with formatting my program output (very expected from an ancient language). I'm not an instant master, and I love taking times, so I'd like to receive any comments, suggestions, and guidance around COBOL. The project mentioned above is available in my GitHub here: Linear Equation Calculator Written in COBOL.

I've been messing around with COBOL a bit, and honestly, the syntax seems pretty easy to understand.

I get that it's old and the ecosystem isn't as convenient as Python or JS, but is that really the main reason people move away from it?

Like, what if the tooling and libraries were actually nice to use? Would people be more open to it, or is there something fundamental I'm missing?

2 years ago I left my job as a software engineer in fintech to start https://www.cobolcopilot.com/.

Since then we've raised $ from top VCs, hired a talented team, and spent many thousands of hours teaching AI models to decode COBOL. And now, we'd like to share our creation with you: for the next few weeks we're opening access up to a limited number of members from this community. We can't wait to hear what you think.

Shoot me an email ([email protected]) and mention you're from here and I'll prioritize your access!

I'm a journalist for a major tech magazine, and I want to write a story about COBOL systems and people who might be affected by DOGE. I'm looking to talk off-record to any COBOL programmer (or contractor) in any U.S. government agency who wants to bring attention to this story. Please email me at [email protected] if interested.

36 years of experience on IBM OS. The big stumbling block is I have virtually no experience with CICS and DB2. It just happened that way. I have been with 13 different shops and just didn't get to work on it. I have used SQL before and I have done online programming using IDMS/ADSO. Anyway, that, and I'm 62 - I think these are the reasons I can't get hired. I'm not screwing up interviews either. Full disclosure, I am black. It may or may not be a reason, only the interviewers know what's in their hearts. I know for sure of one position I didn't get back in the late 80's because of my race. Maybe it's not hurting me, but I don't think it helps when you look at the whole package. I have been out of work for 6 months. I get plenty of calls, have had several interviews, but no offers. I would like to hear your theories.

Edit: I am in the U.S specifically in the southeast.

I have been developing in COBOL for 30 years so I have a pretty good understanding of it. I coded the work around for Y2K and understand windowing of dates. I know there is no date type. Please tell me how 1875 is some sort of default date (in a language with no date types).

Hello! Politics aside With Musk finding out there are people over 300 receiving Social security still, someone commented on a post about COBOL and how birthdates are entered.

Instead of arguing on there about something I don’t know, I would like answered as to if his comment is true about the dates. I really don’t care what side you’re on or anything about what musk is doing, just whether the statement about cobol is true.

I made a small Galaxian-inspired terminal arcade game in GnuCOBOL + ncurses.

The experiment was simple: can COBOL handle a real-time arcade-style loop without becoming completely unreadable?

Most of the game logic is COBOL the C part is tiny: just a small ncurses bridge for input, drawing, colors, refresh, delay, and cleanup.

Repo:

https://github.com/DukeDeSouth/cobol-galaxian

I am curious how more experienced COBOL people would structure this different way?

EDIT: I am not saying we _should_ be rewriting legacy systems just because theres a shiny new language. I am just interested in programming languages and curious if COBOL has any interesting or unique attributes, rather than asking about the reasons we dont just rewrite legacy systems.

Sorry for bringing up a comon topic but I didnt feel the answers I found quite matched my question.

Im a CS MSc student and with the recent drama with DOGE I was wondering if there are reasons for certain institutions and use cases to use COBOL over other programming languages. I understand of course that its very expensive to migrate, specially if you have strict conditions on your software since you need to transpose these into the new system and get the same assurances, as well as generally "if it aint broke dont fix it".

However I do know that some programming languages sound (specially to youngsters like me) like useless due to their age but that some, like FORTRAN, are just _really_ _really_ good at what they do (e.g. scientific computing for FORTRAN) and are still in use because being old doesnt make a language not good.

I havent really heard much of the same for COBOL though, I get the impression its a somewhat outdated language and obviously it makes sense to maintain systems written in it but that its use case (mainframes) arent as relevant anymore and that a lot of what COBOL "gives" you is found in other more modern languages which are considered preferable. Is this true? Or are there some benefits to COBOL people are missing?

I guess the short question would be "if you had infinite resources (developer hours, time, etc) to migrate a COBOL system to any language of your choosing, would you do it? why? and what language would you choose?"

Hi!

I work in IT but I'm wondering if learning COBOL would be a good move. What training should I follow in order to find a first job? What salary can I expect in Canada as a junior?

Any feedback about junior, experienced or senior COBOL programmer appreciated!

Thanks!

Ok so this post needs some explaining. I wrote a COBOL code to process a data file that had image data on it (x coordinate, y coordinate, brightness) to build and display an annulus around the brightest point in an image. For anyone interested here is the equation.

(Inner Radius)^2 <= ((X - CenterX)^2 + (Y - CenterY)^2) <= (Outer Radius)^2

But the final logical test that the COBOL runs is IF

Inner_Radius² <= Final_Value <= Outer_Radius²

Keep the Brightness value, else replace it with 0000 (0000 creates a black pixel when I run my python script to convert the data file back to an image)

However, I made a classic error. I defined the variables that hold Inner_Radius² and Outer_Radius² with PIC 9(4), which was too small to hold some of the results, meaning that the system would put 0000 as the value of those variables. The lower I set the variables the more dense the rings were. And if I messed with the value for Final_Value that gave me different generation patterns. I found the generations made from this mistake to be beautiful, hypnotic and interesting so I thought to share them. Please enjoy.

EDIT: if you downloaded it off the github before 2026/01/26 please redownload them. I made some bug fixes