The Code That Runs Your Life
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Banks, healthcare providers, and retailers around the world still rely on COBOL, a programming language originally developed in the 1960s. By all accounts the code is powerful, practical, and very rarely problematic. But the small group of people who still know the language are aging out of the workforce.
What happens when there are no more COBOL coders left?
Guest: Clive Thompson, journalist and author of "Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World."
Host: Lizzie O’Leary
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's something so romantic about winter and I don't know whether that's just because |
| 0:05.4 | I'm a bit for homebody and I love a 5. |
| 0:08.0 | But I think it's just the holiday period, it's just for me, it's the most romantic period. |
| 0:14.2 | And I think anyone who's listened to my records will know that I'm quite a big fan of romance. |
| 0:18.8 | Join in every sip with Red Cups now Back at Starbucks. |
| 0:30.5 | Good afternoon everybody. |
| 0:33.7 | Just to remind folks what our plan is for the next couple of days. |
| 0:36.9 | Early on in a pandemic, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy held these regular press conferences. |
| 0:42.4 | This one was in April of 2020. |
| 0:44.2 | On employment with skyrocketing, on the 17 million claims had been filed around the country |
| 0:49.1 | in the previous three weeks. |
| 0:51.1 | President Trump had just signed the CARES Act which gave unemployed workers another |
| 0:54.8 | 600 bucks on top of state benefits. |
| 0:57.6 | And New Jersey's unemployment website kept crashing as people tried to sign up. |
| 1:02.4 | So Murphy came to this press conference with a request. |
| 1:05.3 | It's secondly in our list of volunteers, Judy Nellie, do we need healthcare workers |
| 1:09.1 | but given the legacy systems we should add a page for cobalt computer skills. |
| 1:15.4 | He actually meant cobalt, which stands for Common Business Oriented Language. |
| 1:21.1 | Murphy said he needed cobalt programmers to help get things running again. |
| 1:25.1 | But literally we have systems that are 40 plus years old and there'll be lots of post |
| 1:33.7 | more of them. |
| 1:34.7 | One of them on our list will be how the heck do we get here when we literally needed cobalt |
... |
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