[bitsandboots]

I also find it funny that COBOL is treated as the boogeyman. It's just a language. Any programmer by profession should be capable of learning a language decently in a month, and better within the year.

So when people say "all the COBOL programmers are retiring!", they're completely missing the problem. The language isn't the problem.

The problem is the design of the software written in COBOL, z/OS itself, and the operators that defend its design. The software has so much dark matter due to tech debt, partially due to age, partially due to vintage. z/OS has tech debt, due to designs for a different era being carried forward. Manual processes that should have safety guards and technical limitations abound.

But that's not to say DOGE should be trying to rewrite this stuff. Not on their schedule and not with their staff. Because it will create bugs. The same reason this software persists.