I learned a little bit of COBOL when I worked in a finance company, just to help on call stuff. And I think you’re right. Learning COBOL the language is easy.

I learned a little bit of COBOL when I worked in a finance company, just to help on call stuff. And I think you’re right. Learning COBOL the language is easy. It’s just an imperative language with no fancy constructs. But jcl and the specifics of db2 and mainframes, and also the weird terminal emulator you need to use to work with them is the hard part. Java is 100x more complicated than cobol, but mainframes and the surrounding infrastructure are very alien compared to todays stuff.