All articles tagged with #legacy code
IBM stock fell about 13% after Anthropic said Claude Code could automate COBOL modernization, threatening IBM’s legacy mainframe business since COBOL underpins many critical systems (including the majority of U.S. ATM transactions); the AI disruption adds to market jitters and IBM has slumped more than 24% year-to-date.
The article argues that Ruby is not a serious or modern programming language due to its slow performance, lack of advanced tools for responsible coding, and its reliance on the outdated Ruby on Rails framework, which has kept it relevant mainly through legacy code and nostalgia rather than technical superiority.
Meta is undertaking a major project to rewrite a decades-old C messaging library used across its platforms into Rust, aiming to modernize the codebase and improve developer experience, as discussed in the Meta Tech Podcast with engineers Elaine and Buping.
IBM is developing the watsonx Code Assistant, an AI tool aimed at refactoring ancient COBOL code for its mainframe systems. The tool will analyze, refactor, and test the code, with humans still involved in the process. IBM hopes that the generative AI will help decouple individual services from monolithic COBOL apps, making the code more modular. The company plans to offer the tool in three steps: refactoring, transforming the code into mainframe-friendly Java or COBOL, and validation with AI-generated test cases. While AI assistance could help modernize COBOL code, concerns remain about the loss of institutional memory and the potential for AI-generated code to introduce errors.