From Bloomberg, February 23:
International Business Machines Corp. shares had their worst day in more than 25 years on Monday, after AI startup Anthropic PBC said its Claude Code tool can help modernize Cobol, a dated programming language that’s run on IBM computers.
The stock plunged 13% in its biggest single-day percentage loss since October 2000. With the decline, IBM shares have fallen 27% in February, on track for its biggest one-month slide since at least 1968, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“Modernizing a Cobol system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post. “Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in Cobol modernization.”
IBM defended the company’s prospects saying its core mainframe computer business offers a platform that provides the same quality of performance and security for various programming languages and not just Cobol.
“The value IBM mainframe delivers has nothing to do with Cobol,” IBM Senior Vice President Rob Thomas wrote in a blog post on Monday. “Whether the application is written in Cobol, Java, or any other language, the platform provides the same guarantees. The language is not the source of that value. The platform is.”
Most of the mainframe computers that run Cobol are made by IBM, and the selloff made the company the latest to see heavy pressure on the fear that artificial intelligence will weigh on the growth prospects of legacy companies.
A significant chunk of IBM’s revenue remains tied to its mainframe business. These massive customer-owned servers run some applications on Cobol, a coding language that’s older than those now common in the rest of the technology industry. Mainframes are still purchased by customers with high reliability needs, such as those in finance or government.
On Friday, Anthropic introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model, spurring widespread selling of cybersecurity stocks. Software stocks have been broadly weaker this year on concerns over AI-related disruption; a major software ETF is down 27% this year, on track for its biggest one-quarter drop since the financial crisis in 2008.....
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If interested see "What is COBOL and Who Still Uses It?" at CBT Nuggets:
Many COBOL developers are nearing retirement age, and younger coders are less likely to learn it. This means that when problems arise, many companies no longer have a COBOL expert on hand. But it’s still used extensively: more than 95% of ATM swipes and 43% of banking systems are written in COBOL. Experts estimate that COBOL systems support more than $3 trillion in daily commerce through transaction processing....
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Now do Fortran.
