Modernizing the Common Language - COBOL

Frumious Wombat writes "Over at the Register Developers section, they are quoting the head of research for Ovum Consulting on the continuing dominance of COBOL in certain business applications. The antique language accounted for 75% of all business transactions last year, and some 90% of financial transactions. For all the time spent arguing the merits of Ruby vs. C#, should the community spend more time building tools to make COBOL livable? The article goes into what it terms 'legacy modernization', and lays out some details on how to go about it. From the article: 'The first stage in the legacy modernization process is to understand the business value embodied within legacy systems. This means that developers must give business domain experts (business analysts) access to the legacy, using tools that help them find their way around it at the business level. Some awareness of, say, COBOL and of the legacy architectures will be helpful but we aren't talking about programmers rooting around in code - modern tools can automate much of this analysis for staff working at a higher level.'"

Comments

Re:Easy Solution

[IdleTime]

I'm sure you are an expert on COBOL since you so easy can determine it is possible to rewrite all the business applications in PHP. Do you know why COBOL is still used?

I haven't written COBOL in close to 20 years, but I do know that you will have a problem doing the same tasks in a different language as easy as it is done on COBOL. PHP got to be the worst alternative, I would rather rewrite it in APL than PHP.