[trigonated]

> In my country we’ve spent a literal metric fuck ton of money trying to replace some of the COBOL systems powering a lot of our most critical financial systems. From the core or our tax agency to banking. So far no one have been capable of doing it, despite various major contractors applying all sorts of “modern” strategies and tools.

To be fair, it's possible that the current systems are just poorly documented. All the best strategies in the world are hopeless against poor documentation/spec work.

[devjab]

This is probably the case for some, but not for all of them. There have also been attempts at completely replacing something like our digital registration for elections system. Basically every adult is issued a voter card when we have elections, in the “olden days” you’d register at tables with people with big voter books, where they’d need time to find you which can generate some rather large queues in rush hour. With the digital system every voting card has a barcode as well as the other info and they can just scan your barcode which is much faster.

Anyway the old thing was build when the public owned their own IT. It’s been something like 25 years since that was privatised and nobody has been capable of replacing that old system, meaning that the old organisation which is now a private company has a monopoly. Which is against our law.

There is really not a lot to it technically. But apparently it’s proving impossible to replace the mainframe way of dealing with it through the CISC input terminal thing. I have no idea why, we’ve had some of our biggest IT suppliers taking turns at cracking it and nobody has been able to so far. I think the ultimate “must not break” deadline was 10 years ago.

This was the “easiest” example. A lot of the others have decades of stuff build on top of them. There is the COBOL core and what has been hard for people to replace here is the bi-temporal data. But on top of the maintain there is a myriad of different Java services (only Java if you’re lucky) which turn the data into something which can be worked with and consumed by well, http.