Comment by eggy
14 hours ago
I started recently to learn Cobol, since 2 companies my friend and son were working at need them desperately. They would prefer people with experience in the bankiing/finance industry, but at this point all the over 60s guys are leaving, and nobody is left to pick up the mantle. They told me even though the money is great >$225k starting, people don't want to maintain legacy Cobol code with very high risk if you mess up.
Refactoring legacy code seems like something where formal methods could help. "Prove that these 2 subroutines are equivalent, across all inputs" is exactly the kind of thing that they're good at!
The language is actually relatively modern, it kept up with time (latest ISO version is from 2023), and there are even IDEs like Rocket Visual COBOL, granted not something that you might get on e.g. z/OS, but there are others.
It actually compiles to native code, it handles well its use case, batch processing business data, and despite everything less verbose than most agents markdown files I keep seeing.
Yes the risk is there, but it is also there for any kind of legacy application in enterprise scenarios, which is why most migrations fail.