[pronoiac]

I checked my bookmarks, and there have been success stories for porting cobol into other languages. Here's a discussion from 2019, from cobol into Java: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839563

Phase 1: automation of cobol to (ugly) Java

Phase 2: make the code more idiomatic for (cleaner) Java

Phase 3: move the infrastructure to AWS

In the discussion, someone mentioned "There are commercial COBOL compilers available that compile to Java bytecode."

Offhand, if someone were still on cobol, I'm not sure if they'd trust the comparatively new Elixir, but I can also see leapfrogging being a thing. (And I know it's based on Erlang, which pre-dates Java.)