the cobol system was already tested for years or decades, important bugs are already fixed, it’s other quirks have became part of the workflow for people using it, and for other systems interacting with it, some of them likely also cobol. if you write a new system, it has to work the exact same way. same features, same bugs, same everything. but realistically it will have brand new bugs, it will miss some functions and do some others differently enough that it sometimes causes problems, and nobody knows why.
I think just the size of the projects. My employer has had a team of ten-ish people working full time on porting a piece of our COBOL program (the full thing was deemed not possible to port to a single modern application, so it’s getting split up) for about a year now. I was peripherally involved in four rounds of increasingly integrated testing environments. Go live was yesterday. They rolled it back three hours in.
It’s hard for a company to invest multiple people’s salaries for many years on reworking software that currently mostly works.
What’s the biggest hurdle to porting old systems written in COBOL to newer languages? Besides the glaring conflict of interest for you.
the cobol system was already tested for years or decades, important bugs are already fixed, it’s other quirks have became part of the workflow for people using it, and for other systems interacting with it, some of them likely also cobol. if you write a new system, it has to work the exact same way. same features, same bugs, same everything. but realistically it will have brand new bugs, it will miss some functions and do some others differently enough that it sometimes causes problems, and nobody knows why.
Hahaha port. Get a load of this person thinking COBOL is being ported! I bet they like the number 4.
I think just the size of the projects. My employer has had a team of ten-ish people working full time on porting a piece of our COBOL program (the full thing was deemed not possible to port to a single modern application, so it’s getting split up) for about a year now. I was peripherally involved in four rounds of increasingly integrated testing environments. Go live was yesterday. They rolled it back three hours in.
It’s hard for a company to invest multiple people’s salaries for many years on reworking software that currently mostly works.