
Engineers' Corner: On COBOL and Legacy Systems - rbanffy
https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/Engineers-Corner-On-COBOL-and-Legacy-Systems.aspx
======
foxyv
Everything decays. The hardware that your software runs on dies and no one can
find a replacement. The regulations covering your business change. Your vendor
stops supporting SSLv2Hello. Your clients ask for a feature that your
competitors provide. IBM raises prices on your contract that renewed last week
to make up for flagging revenue. Suddenly 3-9s of uptime isn't enough for your
clients and you need a second datacenter.

Once it starts costing more than $200 a person/hour to deal with things like
this you are kinda hosed. Especially when it will take thousands of hours to
make a change. Hence why everyone wants to move to cheaper languages like
Java, Node.JS, etc...

Otherwise, you end up with a COBOL system running on a linux virtual machine
that is emulating an IBM mainframe from 1992 that is nearly impossible to
maintain because the developers have all died or retired and left no
documentation. Your remaining contractors have billed a quarter million in
costs and the change still isn't working.

