Remember the movie “My Name Is Nobody”? I guess I’m “No One”.
I programmed in COBOL for about 15 years or so. I’ve read you can name your price if you would like to maintain some code. Maybe I could do that part time once I retire.
The article says IBM’s watsonx can help convert it to a more “modern” programming language: Java. Yikes. That’s not what I would convert it to but that’s just me, I guess.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
I would have thought PL/1 would have been a natural choice
for anyone converting from COBOL.
Fortran does not seem to be in quite as bad a position.
It has evolved and there are still programmers using it
Some of the older space probes have Cobol and Fortran software. You cant convert that.
One of my teachers in college said PL/1 was the queen of languages for him. I’ve never touched it myself.
I always understood Fortran’s strong suit to be math. COBOL’s strength is batch processing, sorting, file I/O, that type of thing. They seem very different from one another, but each fills a need and is well suited to where they are used.
I would have thought they’d use a more “modern” language like Rust. Java makes sense in that there is currently a large installed base, it’s a mature language, and has many developers available.
It was close to that once. They introduced PL/1 for teaching when I was at Uni.
A lot of the file handling ability of COBOL ( and PL/1) became
redundant when databases became available.
Modern languages like C and Rust do less with files and are therefore smaller and easier to learn.
I understand your reaction to Java. I tried once… and failed
You can get a PL/1 compiler for Linux