this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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COBOL is perfectly suitable for financial purposes for which it was designed. The SSA code has gone through decades worth of changes and improvements that cannot be replicated even in 10 years.
Nobody uses COBOL for greenfield projects, even in the banking and financial sectors. And, as people with COBOL expertise die of old age, it becomes increasingly unmaintainable.
I bet is cheaper to teach it to new programmers than to rewrite old software. Just because a language is old doesn’t mean it is unlearnable or that software written in it needs to be rewritten.
Agreed. But those that do know COBOL make BANK maintaining the old financial systems!
The code is already in production, there is no point in rewriting it. It can be maintained for decades to come. New features can be implemented in other languages and over time.