COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages (opens in new tab)

(wired.com)

7 pointschrisaycock9d ago3 comments

3 comments

Mostly when people talk about COBOL, what they mean is CICS. It would be more pertinent to say that IBM are the asbestos of platform vendors.

nacozarina9d ago

I remember helping UniKix rehost CICS apps onto Sun boxes in the late 90s, build web front ends with tn3270 scrapers, wild times

Taikonerd9d ago

I feel like this article ends just as it's starting to get going ;-)

In the COBOL modernization space, I want to highlight Mechanical Orchard[0]. Their analysis tools can trace the execution of individual jobs, and decompose a complex data flow graph into a series of nodes with inputs and outputs.

Once they have that, each individual node can be translated into a modern language, with every individual (input => output) serving as a sort of black-box test. That way, they can gradually rewrite a complex system, while ensuring that the semantics stay the same at each step.

(Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm using the correct COBOL/mainframe terminology, but you know what I mean.)

[0]: https://www.mechanical-orchard.com/

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