Anyone attempted to write a COBOL code generator in a more comfortable language? Or isn‘t code generation the problem, rather the reading/modifying legacy code?
Its this. If someone is doing greenfield z/OS development, I would assume they are probably using a more modern language (IBM highlights Java and C/C++ support on z/OS), not COBOL. But there is tons of legacy code in COBOL – much of it that was never well-documented. Sure, there’s fewer available COBOL programmers, but in many cases the orgs with these systems have also lost most of the people that were serving as living documentation, which is not great when the system is operating in near-steady-state, but becomes a critical problem when it needs new changes. So, the COBOL programmers they tend to need are for code archeology, temporally-displaced mind-reading to understand the original intent of code and diff it with emergent requirements, and maintenance on legacy systems.
COBOL development is nearly never greenfield, and many of the (mainframe) systems you'll have to work with behave differently than you'd expect if you're someone that learned about software after the 80's.