[vesinisa]

I hate that it's spam-walled but that Medium article sure was a riveting read.

Basically the conclusion is that for mainframe systems that need to process lots of transactions fast the performance of COBOL is hard to beat. Languages like Java are not even very well suited for these type of calculations since BigDecimal is not part of the core programming idiom.

With the additional cost that migration would carry, it's actually less risky and more cost effective to keep maintaining the COBOL system, even if it means paying in-house to train programmers in this ancient technology.