Modernization industry news and analysis, organized by language.
Five COBOL Assumptions That Don't Hold Up Anymore
COBOL supposedly has no new blood, no modern tooling, and no future outside old banks. Checked against IBM's own training numbers, an AI tool built specifically to read it, and where mainframes actually sit in insurance and airlines today, most of that turns out to be wrong, or right for reasons that have nothing to do with the language.
The Myth of the Unhackable Midrange
Fortra's annual security study puts real numbers behind IBM i's reputation for security — and the numbers on default passwords, *ALLOBJ sprawl, and exit points aren't nearly as reassuring as the reputation suggests.
2026-08-30
When the Program Doesn't Have to Die: Inside PL/I's ON-Condition System
PL/I's error handling doesn't use return codes or status flags. It uses ON-conditions, a structured recovery model IBM built into the language in 1964, before 'exception handling' was a term anyone used. Here's how it actually works, and the one place it still bites people today.
2026-08-30
Assembler Didn't Change. Everything Around It Did.
HLASM's instruction set has barely moved since 1992. What actually shifted in 2026 was the silicon underneath it, an AI tool built to read its 'historically motivated constructs,' and a real fight over whether Git finally replaces the library manager.
2026-08-30
Six Times PowerBuilder Tried to Leave the Desktop — And Why Appeon Marked Them All Obsolete
Appeon's own current documentation flags six PowerBuilder integration technologies as obsolete, from EJB clients to ActiveX Web DataWindow controls. The ownership history behind each failed bet explains why PowerServer, the platform's current cloud strategy, is built on a different premise.
2026-08-30
What RAD Studio 13.1 Actually Shipped
A feature-by-feature accounting of Delphi's current release cycle - the Windows-on-Arm compiler, the Kai AI agent, and a Community Edition finally caught up to the paid track - with the real TIOBE number attached instead of the usual vibes.
2026-08-30
ColdFusion's Java Bet, Twenty Years Later
Every new CFML feature shipping in 2026, and the JVM sibling language built to inherit its codebases, traces back to one architectural rewrite Allaire shipped in 2002.
2026-08-30
The Fortran Toolchain Nobody Expects to Exist in 2026
A package manager with a thousand-plus GitHub stars, a from-scratch compiler with its own Jupyter kernel, and PyTorch bindings written by working scientists: real, dated evidence that Fortran is being actively built, not just kept on life support.
2026-08-30
The Rollback Nobody Tested: Inside the 2012 Bank Batch Failure That Locked Out 6.5 Million Customers
RBS, NatWest, and Ulster Bank didn't go down because of bad COBOL. They went down because nobody had tested what happens when you undo a mainframe batch scheduler upgrade that had already been modified. The regulator's own findings show exactly where it broke.
2026-08-30
IBM Trained an AI on 10 Million Lines of RPG. It Still Can't Write It.
A skeptical, source-by-source look at watsonx Code Assistant for i and the Granite models behind it — what IBM has actually shipped, what it has only promised, and why the flagship successor quietly swapped IBM's own model for a third-party one.
2026-08-30
The Forum Thread That Doubles as PL/I's Install-Base Directory
There's no market report that lists who still runs PL/I in production. What exists instead is a public IBM support forum thread, a handful of named European banks, and a merger that quietly handed one of them to somebody else.
2026-08-30
The Systems That Never Got the Rewrite Memo
The IRS still calculates refunds on code that traces to 1962. Visa and half the airline industry still route transactions through an operating system that grew up as System/370 assembler. This is what 'still in production' actually looks like, with the audits to prove it.
2026-08-30
The PowerBuilder Job Market Is Smaller and Weirder Than the Job Boards Suggest
LinkedIn shows 1,000-plus PowerBuilder listings. Dice shows two. Both numbers are real, and the gap between them, plus a small but genuinely active core of MVPs, forums, and a conference that just went year-round, is what the platform's community actually looks like in 2026.
2026-08-30
Three Delphi Shops, and Why Nobody Rewrote Them
A broadcast ad-sales platform, a geological modeling company, and a nonprofit CRM vendor: three named, on-the-record production Delphi codebases, with the actual headcounts, line counts, and dollar figures behind why none of them migrated off it.
2026-08-30
Who's Actually Hiring ColdFusion Developers in 2026
A look at who's actually posting ColdFusion job listings this year, the 20-year-old open-source framework quietly still growing underneath them, and a documented attempt to teach the language's JVM successor to students who've never touched CFML.
2026-08-30
The Reference Implementation: How 47-Year-Old Fortran Still Anchors NumPy, MATLAB, and R
BLAS shipped as a Fortran library in 1979. LAPACK moved to Fortran 90 in 2008. Every major numerical computing platform in daily use still calls into that lineage for its actual linear algebra — and the 2021 Turing Award said so explicitly.
2026-08-30
The Second Y2K: Why COBOL's Emergency Fix Is Running Out the Clock Again
Most Y2K remediation in COBOL didn't expand the year field, it guessed the century with a threshold value called a pivot year, and that guess has its own expiration date.
2026-08-30
5 Myths About Working in an RPG Shop
What it's actually like inside an IBM i shop in 2026 — checked against real survey data, a very recent trade-press piece on being a 'team of one,' and an actual forum fight over free-format RPG that still isn't settled.
2026-08-30
PL/I vs. COBOL: The Fifty-Year Scorecard
IBM built PL/I to make COBOL and FORTRAN unnecessary. It didn't work. But fifty years later, one of these languages is still getting hardware-specific compiler releases and the other is the punchline. A round-by-round look at a rivalry that never actually ended.
2026-08-30
Below the Compiler: What Every Abend Traces Back To
COBOL doesn't crash. Neither does PL/I. What actually happens is a register ends up holding a bad address, and assembler is the only language on z/OS that makes you look at that directly.
2026-08-30
Three Roads Out of PowerBuilder (And Why the Vendor Sells You All Three)
A decision framework for PowerBuilder teams weighing an in-place upgrade, a PowerServer cloud conversion, or a full rewrite — including the incentive structure of the one company selling all three paths.
2026-08-30
The Delphi You Can't Google
Search GitHub or a developer survey for Delphi and you'll find almost nothing. That isn't decline, it's a measurement problem, and the software quietly running hospitals, ATMs, and point-of-sale terminals is the reason why.
2026-08-30
The ColdFusion Patch Cadence Playbook
Adobe just doubled its ColdFusion security-bulletin schedule. Here's the real CVE math behind that decision, what a disciplined shop's patch cycle looks like, and where Lucee fits in.
2026-08-30
The Aliasing Advantage: Why Fortran Still Wins the Performance Argument
A compiler-level look at why Fortran keeps beating naively-written C in numerical code, what DO CONCURRENT actually does when it hits a GPU, and what the 2023 standard changed.
2026-08-30