7 November 2020 | New Scientist | 45A
S THE coronavirus pandemic swept
across the US, it brought with it an
unprecedented economic crisis.
As firms shut down and people stayed home,
the country’s unemployment rate shot up
from 4.4 per cent in March to 14.7 per cent
in April, adding fuel to a political fire already
raging in a tumultuous election year.
That much is well known. But the stories
of many of those who lost their livelihoods
and sought help exposed a slower-burn
technological crisis. Outdated computer
systems simply fell over as they attempted
to deal with the flood of people applying
for welfare benefits – and hardly anyone
around knew how to fix things.
It is far from an isolated problem.
Tangled webs of computer code built up
over decades, often written in programming
languages now rarely taught or understood,
underpin IT systems across the world, in
government departments, banks, airlines,
hospitals and more. Coronavirus taught
us a lot about how the systems we had
assumed would assist and protect us
can fail in a crisis. As the fallout continues,
it is becoming ever clearer that we need
to revisit the computer code that
underpins many aspects of our
societies before disaster strikes. >
Code red
Outdated computer software underpinning
much of the modern world is leading us into
disaster, says Edd Gent
1959, it was aimed at allowing corporations
to program business software on large
mainframe systems. It was wildly successful.
“The staying power of COBOL is the fact
that it’s easy to use,” says Barry Baker at
IBM in New York.
With the advent of personal computing
and the internet, COBOL lost ground to
newer, more flexible general-purpose
languages, but roughly 220 billion lines
of COBOL code still support the systems
behind businesses and other institutions
worldwide. Perhaps most significantly,
it underpins huge chunks of the world’s
financial sector. According to Reuters,
43 per cent of the planet’s banking systems
run on COBOL and 95 per cent of ATM
transactions still rely on the language.COBOL cowboys
The extensive use of COBOL in welfare
processing systems was seemingly behind
the US unemployment benefit fiasco.
Universities have stopped teaching this
programming language, and when state
governments needed to scale up their
systems quickly to deal with the surge in
demand, skilled labour was in short supply.
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy madeThousands of different programming
languages exist, performing the same basic
job: translating real-world commands such
as “import this data” or “run this calculation”
into the strings of binary 1s and 0s that
encode information in computer processors
and memory chips. Certain ones dominate
(see “Top five languages”, page 46), but new
languages pop up as requirements change.
Google developed the Go language, for
example, to streamline the development
of massive applications running across
hundreds of servers in the cloud. “There’s
still a rich space out there where people are
exploring new ideas and trying to make
things better,” says Barbara Liskov at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As new languages become favoured,
so others fall out of use or find a different
purpose. Fortran, for example, was developed
by IBM in the 1950s for general business use.
It went out of favour in corporate circles, but is
still prized by physicists for its mathematical
chops, thanks to its ability to run many
operations in parallel at breakneck speeds.
Other languages stick around,
unfashionable, but too deeply embedded
in computing systems to get rid of. COBOL,
or the common business-oriented language,
is a prime example. When first released in