A simple rewrite... (Score 1)

Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from COBOL.
"[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to COBOL-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in COBOL. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken COBOL code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain COBOL code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in COBOL. Its because the COBOL code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."