This is just Micro Focus astroturfing! They don't have a business in a world where banks and government agencies have written their software in a modern language.

Here's a comment I made a month ago about another thinly-veiled Micro Focus press release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987206

Why would they undertake such a massive task if they don’t have the need?

It’s cheaper to pay for training so new hires can write obsolete languages on IBM’s last innovative release (the AS400).

I work in fintech, and my company is switching over to Java. It's gonna take a few more years, but they are implementing more than legacy code.

That's exactly why "Java is the new Cobol" is an occasionally-heard slogan.

Oh please... Yes, Micro-Focus is mentioned, and for all I know a Micro-Focus employee might have written the piece. But they're only mentioned in passing, and the bulk of the article is a solid coverage of the history of COBOL, which is interesting in its own right. If MF get a little extra attention as a result of people reading this, I - for one - am not going to begrudge them that.

Something of a shallow look into why it's still around. Part of it is that it's not just COBOL, but the ecosystem around it that makes it harder to port. Porting over a COBOL program from MVS, OS/400, MPE, etc, also requires porting over the surrounding stuff. Job schedulers, record (vs stream) based files, monitoring, print formats, character encodings, 3270 screen formats, and so on.

It also requires porting something quite intangible over, too. In the days that COBOL was relevant, we took a very long time to write software, and we did a mostly competent job at it.

These days, even if we were using COBOL, we probably wouldn't have as robust and reliable results.

"Move fast and break things" honestly has me sold, unless it's my bank account. Many of the people who know COBOL move slow and don't do halfjobs.

Seems like a lot of that could be emulated or made part of a virtual machine

Technically, yes. Legally, no. See the Hercules emulator for example.

Zdnet writer: “why is COBOL still around?”

Cobol vendor: “well let me tell you how widely it’s still used”

Zdnet writer: “k thx.” sends to editor

It would’ve been way more interesting to get even one customer perspective, say from a bank. Why do they still use COBOL? (Answer: it powers critical infrastructure, it’s risky as hell to migrate, and the benefit isn’t worth the cost right now vs investing elsewhere)

You don't like this COBOL article? Try this COBOL article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288415

It's COBOL, not Cobol. And I keep my COBOL textbook to ensure that I never have to work in COBOL again. I'm certain that as soon as let that textbook, I'll end up needing it.

I originally wrote the headline as COBOL, but HN has some sort of "auto headline munger" that munged it to Cobol. I see it's subsequently been set back to COBOL, presumably by one of the mods.

The point of this seems to be highlighting the micro focus cloud migration marketing piece at the end. Besides some history, very little here.