Neat article. I am quite old but never touched COBOL (they used Java to teach in Uni). There are so many articles about the failures of transitioning on legacy system to a modern one. Like that British bank going over to a Spanish one (TSB?). Does anyone know of success stories? What were their techniques/strategies?

When I hear about the COBOL line count it always makes me think that someone should write a program that eats COBOL as input and spits out Java/C++/LangDuJour as output. Might make a good company. Mind you, it may already exist, or, be impossible because of some aspect of the COBOL language I don't understand.