The problem with COBOL

Grace M. Hopper Photo by Cynthia Johnson/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images

It’s been two weeks since Verge politics reporter Makena Kelly dove into the IT tangle that has taken down unemployment insurance systems across the country. Since then, another 4.4 million people have filed claims — bringing the total to more than 20 million people since mid-March — and the situation has hardly improved. Some people report having to call hundreds of times before getting through, keeping them in limbo for weeks.

A lot of the blame has fallen on COBOL, a 1950s-era programming language that a lot of the systems still run on. But this isn’t like old hardware breaking down, and COBOL isn’t exactly broken. The problems with running a decades-old programming language are more subtle — so subtle that you can run for years...

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