Is Your Next Language COBOL?
A language we’ve thought dead or dying for a couple of decades just won’t die. This is one of those things that drives the younger developers crazy since anything older than 6 months old is “old school” and not the “right” way. I, on the other hand still have my college COBOL books - maybe I should brush up?
September 20th, 2008 at 8:31 am
I did integration work with COBOL, i.e., building a website that had some functionality “back-ended” by COBOL. It was ugly. I also got to see a little bit into how the COBOL sausage is made. It is uglier.
There is a tremendous amount of COBOL written functionality out there that would just take years and years to replace. Sometimes it makes more sense to just leave it be and tie into from the new systems. However, if the system is really important, the maintenance costs of the old system may likely mean that it is cheaper to convert. I also never met a COBOL programmer that really impressed me.
If there is one thing that I learned in my 7 years of IT consulting, it is this: Never buy products from IBM or MicroSoft. They are only designed to lock you in and generate a lot of service revenue. The DB2 Universal Database might be the one exception.