COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages and It Is Dangerously Hard to Remove
The most widely adopted computer language in history is now causing a host of problems across critical infrastructure
The comparison is apt: like asbestos, COBOL was once considered a marvel of engineering. It powered banking systems, government agencies, and insurance companies for decades. Also like asbestos, removing it now is expensive, risky, and often more dangerous than leaving it in place.
The problem is not that COBOL is bad software. Much of it works perfectly well. The problem is that the developers who wrote and maintained these systems are retiring or dying, and almost nobody is learning the language. The knowledge gap is becoming a crisis.
Attempts to modernise COBOL systems have a dismal track record. Migration projects routinely run years over schedule and billions over budget. Several high-profile failures have made organisations even more reluctant to attempt the transition.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility when state unemployment systems written in COBOL collapsed under unprecedented load. Six years later, many of those same systems remain largely unchanged.
Some organisations are now turning to AI to help translate COBOL to modern languages, but the results remain mixed. The logic embedded in decades-old COBOL programs often reflects business rules that nobody fully documents or understands.
Analysis
Why This Matters
Trillions of dollars in daily financial transactions still run through COBOL. The language underpins systems that are too critical to fail and too expensive to replace, creating a slow-moving infrastructure crisis.
Background
COBOL was created in 1959 and became the dominant language for business computing. An estimated 220 billion lines of COBOL code are still in production today.
What to Watch
Whether AI-assisted code translation matures enough to make COBOL migration practical, and whether the shrinking pool of COBOL developers forces organisations into emergency modernisation.