[dwheeler]

The article gets it: the problem isn't COBOL, the problem is lack of maintenance. The analogy is apt, too: if you never put oil in a car & it fails, the problem is not how the car the built.

There are materials for learning COBOL. Here are some materials from the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe project:

https://www.openmainframeproject.org/projects/coboltrainingc...

And when there was a call last year for COBOL programmers to help some of these aging systems, a lot of people immediately popped up: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-linux-foundation-se...

While COBOL has its quirks, it's not that hard to learn. It even has some advantages, for example, it has built-in support for fixed-point decimal arithmetic.

In general, COBOL is the scapegoat, not the actual problem.

[maxharris]

> if you never put oil in a car & it fails, the problem is not how the car the built

No, the analogy is perfectly apt. Electric vehicles are rapidly replacing gasoline vehicles. There is no oil to change in an electric car! Better languages have long since surpassed COBOL.