Plenty of engineers on the market can work professionally in C. Only a small amount of people can write Cobol (or is willing to given that is almost useless). That alone is a good reason to consider Cobol a legacy language and throw away a codebase written in Cobol.
nine_k|11 months ago
Throw away the codebase: no, until you have a well-working, battle-tested replacement. I mean, yes, it's possible to do, and you can even run e.g. Java under z/OS on the same in-house mainframe hardware because you can't trust the public cloud. But you still have to do the massive work of reverse-engineering the ancient, scantly documented Cobol codebase, write a modern replacement, cover a ton of corner cases, run in in prod as a shadow that does all the same work, and comparing the results with the load-bearing Cobol codebase, and switch over very carefully.
Depending on the size of your codebase, the complexity of your processes, the strength of your need for change, and the quality of your engineering org, the above may be a very costly process. Few managers are comfortable to approve such a large cost without a very clear return on this investment. Hence we'll see Cobol running for a few decades more.