COBOL

COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages still in daily use. It was designed in 1959 for business tasks like payroll and accounts, and it reads almost like plain English. Many banks, insurers and government agencies still run core systems written in it, simply because those systems work and replacing them is risky and expensive.

For AI, COBOL is a tricky case. There is very little public COBOL code to learn from, and the people who know it well are retiring. That is why news about models getting better at reading and translating it matters to companies with old software.