How to Automatically Convert COBOL to Go (opens in new tab)

I wrote COBOL back in the day. It'd be easier IMO to learn COBOL than to deal with a transpiled Go program for the rest of eternity. COBOL is not that hard. What is hard is having systems with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but that is hard in any language, and maintaining a transpiled version would only be worse. If the use case is to allow COBOL to run on any platform, fine. But if the plan is to transpile to Go, get rid of the COBOL, and maintain the transpiled version because there are more Go programmers, that sounds a little nuts to me.

If companies paid for COBOL programmers what Google pays for C++ programmers, I'm guessing there would be no shortage of COBOL coders.

Although COBOL can be considered a legacy language, there are still billions of lines of COBOL in production. Modernizing these systems which are costly to run and maintain is a challenge. One solution to this issue is a COBOL to Go transpiler that I want to present in this article.