[derrickdirge]

Boy this sounds familiar.

It's not just banks; many state (and presumably federal) angencies have this exact problem.

The agency I work for now has a large COBOL code base that's been in the process of being converted to Java for a very long time now with varying degrees of success. I frequently have to read through COBOL to figure out what a particular project was supposed to do in the first place. It's not hard to understand, but it's certainly not immediately intuitive for someone who came up on Java.

We have the privilege of still having a few of the authors of the original systems hanging around, but we won't for much longer.