By Anders Bylund
Publication Date: 2026-03-26 12:47:00
International Business Machines (IBM +0.24%) shares took a 13% nosedive on Feb. 23, their worst single-day drop in over 25 years. The culprit? Fears that Anthropic‘s Claude Code AI would make COBOL modernization so fast and cheap that IBM’s mainframe cash cow would dry up practically overnight.
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Just how different is COBOL?
For the curious, here’s a simple “Hello World” program in COBOL:
[hello.cbl]
000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLO.
000300 AUTHOR. JOE PROGRAMMER.
000400 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000500 DATA DIVISION.
000600 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
000700 MAINLINE.
000800 DISPLAY ‘Hello World!’.
000900 STOP RUN.
Compile, run, and enjoy the expected text message.
And here’s the same thing in the modern Rust language:
fn main() {
println!(“Hello,…
