[wvenable]

I've actually programmed in COBOL and fundamentally the problem is all this technology is OLD. Crazy OLD. COBOL has more in common with old-school line numbered BASIC than it does almost any other technology.

It will literally take you months to do something in COBOL on the mainframe that would normally take you a week in anything else. Trust me, you take for granted all the conveniences of modern programming environments. COBOL is very much a product of it's time and it's time was decades ago. The success of these old environments rests entirely on extremely well defined (and tedious) processes, not the technology.

No matter how much they pay you, you probably still won't want to do it -- it's just not intellectually stimulating enough and you will constantly be frustrated.

[coldacid]

>It will literally take you months to do something in COBOL on the mainframe that would normally take you a week in COBOL on anything else.

Fixed that for you.

[wvenable]

I disagree. COBOL itself as about as expressive as BASIC and twice as ugly.

The environment is also terrible but separating COBOL from the environment is pointless.

[Volt]

Is code generation too difficult for COBOL? You'd expect some more modern tools for abstraction and interoperability or something…