[prajwalshetty]

True, I started as a COBOL programmer (did a lot of TELON online screens, JCL, CICS, DB2...) as my first job in 2009, for a biggest retailer - personally it taught me a great deal of software engineering - having a background in electronics engineering helped I guess.

The whole stack, and the complex business built around it over many years makes it so difficult for these large institutions to port their solutions on to a new platform in my experience too.

For a lot of these companies, these backend systems on Mainframes just works and I believe there isn't a proper incentive to move on to a new platform anyway.

[partomniscient]

There's DB2, and then there's IMS-DB/DC...

COBOL itself isn't too difficult to pick up, its the rest of the infrastructure around it. JCL is particularly unforgiving. I'm in total agreement with the parent post of this thread.

I think the thing that bugged me the most about COBOL is the difference between END-IF. and END-IF

Everything else was onerous compared to other languages but relatively straightforward. It's not something to get a simple job done quickly in though.

The simplicity created by things largely remaining the same over time in mainframe world is one of its core strengths.