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COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages
- FrankWilhoit 6mo agoMostly 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.
- nacozarina 6mo agoI remember helping UniKix rehost CICS apps onto Sun boxes in the late 90s, build web front ends with tn3270 scrapers, wild times
- Taikonerd 6mo agoI 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/ https://www.mechanical-orchard.com/