3 years ago

Category: Business, Database, automation

COBOL is under fire, and as states such as New Jersey make headlines following vital system crashes that its citizens depend on—such as unemployment benefits—organizations are pointing fingers at the programming language as the source of their technological woes. However, while COBOL is a 50+-year-old programming language, there are still many use cases for it today.

In addition to CA-Gen and CA-Telon, one legacy language that all organizations should be alert to is Natural.

In most cases, Natural is utilized in tandem with the Adabas database, which can exacerbate the maintenance and extensibility issues that come from a shrinking talent pool—and when it comes to modernizing these environments, they’re often peppered with other programming languages such as COBOL and assembler, adding complexity to the job. For organizations looking to break away from obscure languages and mainframes, the best option for both their immediate and long-term goals is to pursue some form of modernization—and in most cases, the best result is to translate these languages into cloud-ready languages such as Java or C# via an automated refactoring initiative.