[pmilot]

While I generally agree with the "if it ain't broke" sentiment, you have to perform some pretty wild mental gymnastics to end up calling COBOL the "best tool for the job".

Adoption and ease of learning should always be considered when selecting a tech stack for a solution. COBOL's semantics are so foreign to modern programming languages that it makes the language pretty inaccessible.

Also, COBOL's strength is in the generation of reports, but in the end, it's no more expressive for that purpose than any general-purpose programming language coupled with a nice report generation library.

[coldtea]

>While I generally agree with the "if it ain't broke" sentiment, you have to perform some pretty wild mental gymnastics to end up calling COBOL the "best tool for the job".

Do you? Lack of programmers, aside, it was created and evolved exactly for the kinds of jobs its used in.

[ams6110]

It is something of a DSL, as the name suggests (Common Business Oriented Language).

I would also disagree with GP that COBOL's semantics are really very foreign. Variable declarations, assignments, expressions, loops, conditionals, etc. are not that different from other imperative languages. More verbose, certainly, but not foreign.

JCL on the other hand....

[floatboth]

If it's similar to other imperative languages, what makes it a DSL? What is the domain of "business"?

[coldtea]

It's similar to other imprative languages in some constructs, it's very business application focused in others -- e.g. built-in support for forms, for monetary calculations and such.