Anyone (like me) still in the 20th Century writing COBOL? [View all]

Been writing COBOL for 20 years, and there's a big ol' meteor coming; however, a lot of Cobolasaurs are in denial.

I'm 44 and I know I won't retire writing COBOL. Wait, retirement is a reality that is slipping away from all of us. Forget that. Moving on.

Spend a lot of my time patching piss poor code, and I sometimes all but guess what the code does. On a positive note, it really stretches one's powers of omniscience.

Today I spent about 90 minutes chasing down totals on a summary report because it was SO counter intuitive. My client was trying to figure out anything because she has to give the auditor her answers tomorrow. I stayed late and chased it to the ground so that I could give her something substantive. Sent a request to Operations to recover the data file. Well it was half request and half beg because I am not sure they'll be able to respond in time. I am all but certain of my answers, but if I get the data file I can speak with absolute certainty.

A few additional counts, a little structure, some indenting, and anyone at a glance could have read the report and known what the numbers mean. Sounds silly, but those kinds of dopey little changes mean a lot. Make those changes and this mole will be whacked.

Client likes me, boss likes me, get along well with my coworkers, money ain't shit, but the State of Washington is a stable employer. Lot of VB.NET and SQL Server experience in my office, and that clearly is their future direction for conversions.

Two of my friends from a previous job are interviewing this week for open positions. With a little luck, they will both get hired on and one and half of them will be working with me. We're all probably within 2-3 years of each other, and we would jump at the opportunity to convert an application and our skillsets.

I've done a lot of Access and VBA building Operational Data Stores. COBOL to VB is actually a pretty smooth syntactical transition.

Anyone done any COBOL conversion projects? I will probably be playing whack-a-mole for some time, but both the client and I are interested in rehosting the application.