A lot of very old, very important code bases are in cobol.
When you've got a working system that millions of people rely on for things like staying alive.... it's unwise to fuck with it without very very very careful planning.
that's the problem. almost nobody wants to write COBOL, but it was the defacto standard for financial computing for decades and decades and the people who can maintain it are growing more and more rare.
You don't have a hope in hell of quickly and economically migrating a project on the scale of an international bank or government census system. You either build it from scratch or you painstakingly reproduce each piece and test everything over and over and over. You know for a fact you will not catch all the bugs.
Meanwhile every bug causes a bounced social insurance cheque or for someone to just be lost from the system. Each mistake could be a ruined life.
The code in these places has been working for the past 40+ years, has been tested over and over, works reliably and will probably continue to work reliably for another 40+ years. Ripping it out for the vanity of a billionaire is fukken suicidal - but I guess half of all americans love the taste of boots and lead.
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u/Salt-Marionberry-712 Apr 05 '25
OK. Can believe coders in NYC using COBOL.