alt Hacker News> Mainframes still run a surprising amount of critical infrastructure: banking, payments, insurance, airlines, government programs, logistics, and core operations at large institutions. Many of these systems are decades old, but they continue to process enormous transaction volumes because they are reliable, secure, and deeply embedded into business operations.
It saddens me when companies abandon them, it takes so much effort to replicate their power. I often wonder why mainframes never had a more modern easier to maintain and manage programming language designed for them.
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sharts • today at 3:05 AM
You can run kubernetes on mainframes. They’re not as old/out of touch that most people think
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> I often wonder why mainframes never had a more modern easier to maintain and manage programming language designed for them.
Although COBOL is one of the primary programming languages for the mainframe, it can also run Java and Python as the others have mentioned. COBOL itself isn't particularly difficult to grasp for modern engineers, it's readable and has an easy to understand English-like syntax.
The challenge here is learning and becoming proficient in the end to end mainframe ecosystem including the intricacies of z/OS. It's a completely closed off ecosystem and is not as accessible to play around with for the average SWE as compared to windows or linux based development.