Lup Yuen Lee 李立源 @lupyuen@qoto.org

@chrism @2ck @lupyuen
Understanding the language is not the issue. While COBOL may be simple and easy in itself, the real barrier is deciphering the intentions of the original (dead) authors and the "bigger picture". Of course you can understand every single line of the codebase by itself. Understanding a convoluted domain based on a huge codebase with, likely without documentation and of potentially bad quality might not be so trivial.

@2ck @lupyuen agreed, not just lack of confidence. There's "if it works ... " mentally, for which I have some sympathy.

I suppose also it is also testament to how good COBOL and its programmers were that there systems still running. Would be interesting to see how many Java systems are running after the same length of time.

C'mon, any programmer "worth their salt" could easily devour a COBOL program.

When I think to some archaic languages I have to decipher on inherited systems I have had to look after, even C++ is a walk in the park.