COBOL Is the Asbestos of Programming Languages
wired.comMostly when people talk about COBOL, what they mean is CICS. It would be more pertinent to say that IBM are the asbestos of platform vendors.
I remember helping UniKix rehost CICS apps onto Sun boxes in the late 90s, build web front ends with tn3270 scrapers, wild times
I feel like this article ends just as it's starting to get going ;-)
In the COBOL modernization space, I want to highlight Mechanical Orchard[0]. Their analysis tools can trace the execution of individual jobs, and decompose a complex data flow graph into a series of nodes with inputs and outputs.
Once they have that, each individual node can be translated into a modern language, with every individual (input => output) serving as a sort of black-box test. That way, they can gradually rewrite a complex system, while ensuring that the semantics stay the same at each step.
(Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm using the correct COBOL/mainframe terminology, but you know what I mean.)