8080/85/86, z80 assembler, system 360 assembler, Fortran, HP 1000, Dec Vax, basic, Turbo Pascal, National Instruments LabView, C++, C#. Probably forgot a few. Electrical Engineer, so I was only a half-assed programmer. Whatever it took to operate and test my designs. Those were the days...glad they are over!
'LDIR' was the best instruction ever on the Z80. Most instructions didnt do much but that one could move whole memory blocks.
Dude, get real, I learned Fortran in the late 80s! But seriously, a lot of companies used COBOL in the 80s.
This is a bureaucratic failure, not a technical one. Successful code base migrations are done all the time...some more successful than others. Of course there are failures but come on...this is an unemployment management system which should not be overly complex.
Its a money problem. "220 billion lines of COBOL in use today" Each line of code is probably going to cost $10 dollars to migrate. So $2.2 Trillion dollars will be required to do the job. Give a typical development team 100,000 lines of COBOL to migrate to a HTML5 crud app, going to cost you at least 1 million dollars before they are done. Even if you put it at $1 per line by going offshore, still going to cost $220 Billion. But the quality will be much worse.
Yeah...I did not say it would be cheap. I was offered a job with DCX before I landed at my current location. They had 600 developers working in 60 scrum teams building medicare/medicaid management systems for states and they were looking to hire 100 more developers. It was a fully remote position and the offer came in $20k below my ask so I passed. I am not sure how many projects they are working concurrently but the yearly cost could exceed $100 million per year on some of these projects.
Did a project years ago Basic Food hygiene interactive CD's, we charged 10K for the software, had meeting with there IT guys in London, they wanted 120K just to role it out and install on a few PC's, crazy!! We ended up supplying laptops with it on, 12 pubs, £6K worth of laptops much cheaper.
Now there's a language you don't hear a lot any more. I had a package way back in my Commodore-64 days!