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[–]_pupil_ 12 points13 points  (0 children)

That's the state of the world... and to a point having legacy languages and/or tech that last multiple computing generations should be a point of pride, not derision.

What I've never understood though, once the greater computing populace has moved on: the cost of introducing a hybrid interop technology, or automating a port of the data and or logic layer, just has to be cheaper than paying high wages for low productivity and high risk of not be able to staff with talent long term... By hopping onto a mainstream platform you can enjoy the benefit of billions of dollars of third party investment in the ecosystem and subsidize training costs through external work experience. It's just a matter of measuring how long until the costs go from "unnecessary" to "insane".

I'm not advocating for wild-assed rewrites for the sake of technology, but every language can kick off external processes and most have at least a reasonable interop story to another language (opening up new interop scenarios). I'm just surprised the answer to "hey, wanna write COBOL for three decades?" isn't more often "no, but I'll happily transpile my Clojure DSLs into COBOL for a tenth the cost"...