[mrbombastic]

I wonder if a better goal would be valid translation of the COBOL into X language. Obviously that has its own can of worms but it seems like our goal generally should be getting critical systems to more modern languages that can be maintained more easily.

[sanxiyn]

In 2009, 4 million lines of COBOL were migrated to Java using an automatic translator.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2009/07/cobol-to-java/

[kamma4434]

The problem is not translation - once it is ported to Java, who will maintain it? It has no specs, no tests, and it’s a spaghetti mess. Is any weirdness a bug or a feature? Nobody knows. Least of all the body-rental remote devs you hired to maintain it.

[ikari_pl]

which is worse than the same situation, but in COBOL, how exactly?

[kamma4434]

Because you have the same mess plus all the mess and hard to debug incompatibilities and weirdness, added by the translator.

What people don’t get about cobol is that it is a language you can learn in a few days. It is meant to be readable for non-technical users so Cobol itself is not the issue. Once you get past the meaning of sections, and the implicit defaults that are different from modern programming languages, it is way easier than, say, C.

[mech422]

Also, COBOL is basically a special purpose language...It's designed for accounting apps. and reports.

Its really not bad for them either. Verbose, but not bad...

[mrbombastic]

Thanks for sharing! Will need to dig into this