You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.

You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you're still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.

The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Just make the devs learn the language if they don’t know it already. What kind of shitty mid to senior dev can’t learn a new language in a reasonable amount of time.