> COBOL is just not that amazing compared with modern alternatives To be honest, I'm new in field of mainframes, I'm just few weeks playing with Hercules. But

> COBOL is just not that amazing compared with modern alternatives To be honest, I'm new in field of mainframes, I'm just few weeks playing with Hercules. But, after more than 20 years in industry, on micro- level (I near all my life spent with all sorts of x86 and with networking hardware, but also few years with Macs and with microcontrollers), I must say, only thing comparable to mainframes in reliability is Erlang. And if I will take your words, just replace with regex /cobol/erlang/i, most will become truth, because, Erlang have much less LOC numbers, but looks like cost of massive reliability is same - not easy to write, or maintain (it is just too different from classic modern programming way), also Erlang is not very fast (experienced people said, it is close to Perl). All these matter even considering Erlang syntax directly derived from Prolog, nearly best syntax in the modern world! BTW if you want, I'm open to talk about how to make Erlang better for today, or even, talk possible ways to engage COBOL with Erlang on modern hardware.