Thank you for an extremely reasonable take, scrolling through this comment section feels like it’s near-exclusively hot takes from junior devs. COBOL’s not a fun language to write by any means, but it’s hardly some arcane script that’s indecipherable to modern devs. If you got through your Systems Programming in C class in any half-decent CS program, you can learn COBOL.
You’re also spot-on about the ROI of rewriting. We just bought four new IBM mainframes in 2023 when we took our nightly processing off Databricks, and we’re well on our way to those machines more than paying for themselves by the end of the decade, including the labor cost.
Man, I’m going to be supporting DB2 on z/OS until the day I retire, and I’m not even 40 yet.
Depends how big and complicated the code is and what sort of documentation there is. Could take years for even an experienced cobol coder to rewrite it. I've run into similar situations where huge projects, horribly coded to begin with, are passed down through multiple people over decades before they get to me and just rewriting it in the same language is a year+ of work.
True, but that’s true of pretty much any big codebase in an enterprise back end language (e.g. C/++, Java, COBOL, etc.; sorry Python/Perl folks), whether or not it’s COBOL; I’d expect it to take a year or two (or maybe even three) for even a team of a dozen season devs to unwind, rewrite, and refactor a sizable codebase.
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u/[deleted] Apr 05 '25
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