"Valuable software often outlives the technologies used to implement it. Business applications that capture the unique rules, processes, and special cases of an organization - such as inventory, accounting, or sales management - can remain relevant for decades. The business problem they solve is still there, but the technology chosen thirty years ago rarely remains the best way to maintain and extend the system."
"It is possible to perform automated code migrations that produce idiomatic, maintainable code in the target language rather than clunky, line-by-line translations. A step-by-step pipeline approach allows you to break a migration into verifiable stages. Migration pipelines can - and should - be tailored to the specific goals, needs, and preferences of the organization rather than following a one-size-fits-all process."
"When systems are implemented in legacy technologies such as RPG, COBOL, Visual Basic 6, or SAS, organizations face several obstacles: Developers with the required skills become scarce. The ones available are closer and closer to retiring, and the talent pool is very limited Ecosystems are limited compared to modern languages. Forget getting access to millions of libraries and frameworks from Maven Central, NPM, or NuGet."
Business-critical software often remains valuable long after its original technology becomes outdated. Legacy systems in languages like RPG, COBOL, Visual Basic 6, or SAS face skill shortages, limited ecosystems, and integration challenges. Automated migration can produce idiomatic, maintainable target-language code rather than literal, line-by-line translations. A pipeline broken into verifiable stages supports inspection and validation at each step. Migration design should be tailored to organizational goals and treated as an engineering process similar to compiler construction. Using open intermediate specifications such as LionWeb enables existing tools for debugging, inspection, and validation throughout the pipeline.
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