Mainframes aren’t some old crusty thing that’s about to die from all the bugs stuck in the fans or something. We have a cobol system and it runs on modern IBM h

Mainframes aren’t some old crusty thing that’s about to die from all the bugs stuck in the fans or something. We have a cobol system and it runs on modern IBM hardware. Besides, almost everything is virtualized now anyway. The mainframes aren’t the problem, and doing a code conversion of COBOL is not trivial. Their data types are completely at odds to normal data types in modern languages (for example, you can specify a string that is always exactly 30 ascii characters long, the 4th character must be a numeric, the 18th must be ascii but not numeric, the 22nd through 30th must be alphanumeric. All with a native datatype. And that’s just the scalar types, Cobol data types natively support recurrences and redefines and heirarchies. And the language has like 400 keywords.) You end up having to wrap every single line of code in compatibility layers upon compatibility layers, and then it doesn’t even look like python, it just looks like a crappier version of Cobol, to make it function identically. It’s much easier (though more time consuming) to read the code and determine the business rules being enforced and reimplement them in a modern language. I have worked with a lot of Cobol translators and their output is worse than the original code by far. With a lot less confidence and experience with maintaining it.