I Built a Modern UK Government Service Using COBOL

IntroductionA few days ago, I published a rather lengthy blog post titled Building Services to GDS Standards Without a Frontend Framework, exploring whether modern frontend frameworks are really necessary when building UK government services. To demonstrate they aren't, I built the same service using eight different backends.Shortly after publishing, I had a conversation with Matthew Somerville, of traintimes.org.uk fame, who suggested adding Perl as a ninth backend. It's something I plan to explore, so thanks for the suggestion, Dracos!That conversation got me thinking. If I could build a modern government service using eight different backends, how much further could I push the experiment? What about a programming language that predates the World Wide Web, and certainly wouldn't be anybody's first choice for building a modern government service?After a little research, I settled on COBOL. A language so old that calling it "mature" feels like something of an understatement!Yes,…