IBM will offer free COBOL training

The problem with those old codebases that governments, hospitals, big businesses are struggling with is not really the language, it's the engineering practices of that time with regards to constraints of old technology. The language is not the problem - lack of comments, bad variable naming, bad structure (little or no procedures or readability), and just sheer volume of it, is.

It would be very interesting to see the old systems rewritten in a modern language, with modern engineering practices, but keeping the old UI and UX (which often is incredibly ergonomic) - so as to limit scope and not mess it all up by trying to introduce mouse navigation and windowing mess.

http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/examples/Conditn/Conditions.htm

    identification division.
    program-id. letters.
    data division.
    working-storage section.
    01  Char               PIC X.
        88 Vowel           VALUE "a", "e", "i", "o", "u".
        88 Consonant       VALUE "b", "c", "d", "f", "g", "h"
                                 "j" THRU "n", "p" THRU "t", "v" THRU "z".
        88 Digit           VALUE "0" THRU "9".
        88 ValidCharacter  VALUE "a" THRU "z", "0" THRU "9".
    procedure division.
    begin.
        display "Enter lower-case character or digit. No data ends.".
        accept Char.
        perform until not ValidCharacter
            evaluate true
                when Vowel display "The letter " Char " is a vowel."
                when Consonant display "The letter " Char " is a consonant."
                when Digit display Char " is a digit."
                when other display "problems found"
            end-evaluate
        accept Char
        end-perform
        stop run.

So... where is it actually testing what kind of character you input? Where is the code for that? You input a specification for what a Vowel is, for example, and you write explicit code for what to do when a Vowel is input, but where is the code which goes through the specification and decides, yep, that's a Vowel?

COBOL is kind of an odd language. It's verbose in some respects and quite concise in others. Rewriting COBOL into something else would take actual human effort if you wanted the "something else" to look like code a human wrote, as opposed to the intermediate pass of an optimizing compiler, which is what the C GnuCOBOL can output looks like. Re-writing the COBOL might be the best move in some cases, or replacing it with entirely new code, but it isn't something you'd be able to do "for free" in any sense, especially with regards to time.

Govt IT systems and procurement are such a mess, putting it all out there for people to review and complain about is the only way it'll ever get better.

I last used it in 1997, then moved on to Oracle PL/SQL, Java, Oracle's Java software stacks and now iOS ObjC/Swift.

Now I'm 52 years old. I have my own apps now on the store, don't need the money but I am looking for a new challenge - something a bit more social than working for myself.

I think I'll do this COBOL refresher. Only issue is I'm in Australia but I see there may be some demand here too. Nothing to lose - plenty of time at the moment to do the courses. Good for a laugh anyway.