[karmakaze]

The example link goes COBOL->Elixir.

I like this idea of writing Elixir and outputting COBOL. That way it can interface with the operating environment (CICS, IMS) exactly as a natively written COBOL program does. Not that COBOL syntax is particularly hard to learn one by one, but as a whole isn't very memorable. Why learn a programming language with peculiarities like a natural language when I can use something concise that translates to it? There may not need to be a step to eliminate the COBOL output step any more than a language that uses C or js as a target.

I've only seen two kinds of CICS programs in the wild: 1. screen I/O using preformatted BMS maps, 2. transactional with input buffer and output buffer. A third kind was one I wrote for sending dynamically generated terminal stream data for a hypertext online documentation system.

Any of these could be written in Elixir with appropriate libraries and translators. The company I worked at generated the BMS maps and COBOL source from assembling program components with an inclusion/override macro processor and wysiwyg editors--think Visual Basic for mainframes targeting both CICS and IMS.