URL: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money
A wonderful article from 2020 talking about how COBOL's impact as a language, and why the current systems developed on it are so resilient. It'd take A LOT OF WORK to change anything COBOL wise.
Some firms, worried that it’ll be too hard to find COBOL adepts in the years to come, try to rewrite their entire system in a new language. It is nearly always a hellish task: You have to think of every single thing your complex, decades-old software does, and recreate each tiny step in a new language. Three years ago the New York Times rewrote its COBOL-based newspaper-circulation system in Java; it was successful but took longer than expected due to the “vexing” challenge — in the coders’ words — of making sure the new system did what the old one did.
Len Santalucia, the longtime mainframe expert, once worked with the financial institution DTCC to investigate the possibility of converting their COBOL to Java.
“They probably have about seventy-five million lines of COBOL code,” he tells me, “and they found out that it would cost them so much that it would take, maybe, a couple of lifetimes to recover. It was ridiculous. And they have more money than God.”