Hacker News with Generative AI: COBOL

Porting COBOL Code and the Trouble with Ditching Domain Specific Languages (hackaday.com)
Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion.
Programming Languages, Software Development, Legacy Code, COBOL
5 points by jnord 9 days ago | 1 comments
COBOL Language Front End Merged for GCC 15 Compiler (phoronix.com)
A big albeit late feature landed today for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler... The COBOL programming language front-end has been merged!
COBOL, Compilers, Programming Languages, GCC
11 points by cies 46 days ago | 3 comments
Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20? (stackexchange.com)
Does or did COBOL default to 1875-05-20 for corrupt or missing dates?
Programming, COBOL, History, Dates
277 points by SeenNotHeard 68 days ago | 499 comments
Payments crisis of 2025: Not “read only” access anymore (crisesnotes.com)
If you are a current or former career Bureau of the Fiscal Service Employee, especially if you’re a legacy IT programmer with years of experience and especially if you are a COBOL programmer currently working on the PAM, SPS or any other adjacent team, contact me over email or over signal — linked here. My Signal username is “NathanTankus.01”. Legal counsel sources and payments level sources at the Federal Reserve are also helpful.
Finance, Cybersecurity, Government, COBOL, Technical Expertise
562 points by shinryuu 81 days ago | 654 comments
A Minecraft server written in COBOL (github.com/meyfa)
A Minecraft server written in COBOL. It supports Minecraft 1.21.4 (the latest version at time of writing).
Minecraft, Programming Languages, COBOL
344 points by notamy 121 days ago | 121 comments
Patches Posted for Review Adding COBOL Front End to GCC Compiler (phoronix.com)
The COBOL programming language may be 65 years old since its original release but the mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in 2025 might finally see upstream support for it.
Programming Languages, Compilers, Open Source, COBOL
6 points by rbanffy 134 days ago | 0 comments
COBOL's Map Reduce (2022) (ztoz.blog)
COBOL is for Big Data. Well, sort of. Awhile back, I noticed that the COBOL SORT verb was overpowered. Rather than sorting an array of items or even sorting a file, it included a generalized ability to stream in arbitrary inputs — () => Stream[T] —, where T is a key/value pair, and process the outputs in order — SortedStream[T] => (). This power is useful if you are writing a map-reduce program, but excessive for sorting.
Programming, COBOL, Big Data, Map Reduce
5 points by thunderbong 200 days ago | 0 comments
Why COBOL Isn't the Problem (lucid.co)
Programming, Legacy Systems, COBOL
21 points by fanf2 237 days ago | 19 comments
Show HN: COBOL-REKT, a toolkit for analysing and reverse-engineering COBOL (github.com/avishek-sen-gupta)
COBOL, Reverse Engineering, Programming, Software Tools
91 points by armorer 254 days ago | 49 comments