https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
For reference, SSA has roughly twice as many lines of code written in COBOL as the Linux kernel has lines of code written in C.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Even if you can do this with AI and it produces a fully working result, the biggest problems in legacy systems are not the programming languages they are written in.
In fact converting one programming language into another doesn't require AI. That's because programming languages are uniform and exact. You can easily find tools that do this already.
The biggest problem is decades of technical debt and forgotten rules. With old mainframes the people who wrote the code are often no longer with us.