COBOL: Still Running, Nobody Learning
COBOL isn't a technology problem. It's an actuarial problem. The people who understand it are aging out of the workforce. When they leave, the knowledge leaves with them. There's no Stack Overflow for COBOL business logic from 1987.
The US government spent $337 million on COBOL maintenance in a single year. That's not modernization — that's life support.
Java 8: The Enterprise Comfort Zone
Java 8 was released in 2014. Public updates ended in 2019. It remains the most-used Java version in enterprise production — over 35% of all Java applications.
The cost isn't just the subscription. It's the accumulation of workarounds for post-Java-8 ecosystem changes, the inability to use modern libraries, the security vulnerabilities in dependencies that dropped Java 8 support, and the developer frustration of working in a time capsule.
Moving from Java 8 to Java 21 isn't a version bump. It's often a rewrite. Modular system changes, removed APIs, updated dependency trees — the longer you wait, the harder the migration.
Python 2: Officially Dead, Quietly Alive
Python 2 reached end-of-life on January 1, 2020. No security patches. No bug fixes. Officially dead.
The danger isn't the runtime itself — it's the shadow IT. Python 2 scripts run in corners of organizations that security audits never reach. Data pipelines processing customer records. Automation scripts with hardcoded credentials. ETL jobs that feed production databases. All running on a runtime that hasn't received a security patch in six years.
The Common Thread
COBOL, Java 8, Python 2 — three different eras, same problem. Technology that works well enough to avoid replacement, but accumulates risk silently. The cost of maintaining them rises every year. The pool of people who understand them shrinks every year. The security exposure grows every year.
This follows a similar pattern to what we documented for WordPress. The difference is scale: WordPress affects 43% of the web. These three affect the systems that run the global economy.
