#Tag · BT Free Social

@kkarhan @rl_dane @fuchsiii Not to mention the countless companies still running ancient AS400 software in VMs (Costco, for one). This will forever delight me.

...and the endless lines of COBOL still handling god only knows how much of North American banking/financial infrastructure. This will forever shock and horrify me lmao

Kevin Karhan :verified:

@kkarhan@infosec.space replied · 4 days ago

@gordoooo_z @rl_dane @fuchsiii same in #Europe...

I literally withnessed a #COBOL programmer tweeting at his mother that he debugged her code...

Giving "Project Inheritance" a new meaning...

Witchzilla boosted

Elizabeth K. Joseph

@pleia2@floss.social · 4 days ago

I am either famous or infamous for liking #COBOL 😂

But I'm doubling down and re-posted an archived blog post from 2023 with some additional commentary about taking the the "Learning COBOL Programming with VSCode" course: https://princessleia.com/journal/2026/01/on-cobol/

Featuring @waltman @adventofcomputing (and others who aren't on Mastodon)

https://princessleia.com/journal

On COBOL

I like COBOL. Screenshot from The Open Mainframe Project COBOL Programming Course (source) My exposure to it prior to entering the mainframe world almost seven years ago was quiet limited. My friend Walt Mankowski has worked with COBOL over the years, and I’d been to a few talks of his talks that would recount stories […]

Elizabeth K. Joseph

@pleia2@floss.social · 4 days ago

I am either famous or infamous for liking #COBOL 😂

Featuring @waltman @adventofcomputing (and others who aren't on Mastodon)

https://princessleia.com/journal

On COBOL

Cory Doctorow

@pluralistic@mamot.fr · 5 days ago

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code but that means it's producing 10,000 more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

https://pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026)

1 more link(s)

Marty Heyman at COBOLworx

@martyh@cobolworx.social replied · 5 days ago

@pluralistic of course, Corey, that makes vast quantitites of "mission" critical lines of code "liabilities." Hundreds of billions of lines of production #COBOL code for example.

But that's a glib misdirction. Lines of code, human or AI generated, that are in production are both a liability and a responsibility. So if you promote slop or carefully engineered code, you own it and it owns you.