[coldtea]

Most banks and payment systems have old, reliable codebases, a lot of them even in COBOL. Banks don't play with those systems often, and they don't use monstrocities like J2EE for them.

It's the other kinds of enterprise systems that are crap and deserve no respect. Intranet apps in big corporations, the BS systems that always mess up your bills in services companies, slow as molasses web portals for big enterprises and organisations etc, ERP and CRM apps...

[c22]

I've worked on an old COBOL codebase and "reliable" is not a word I associate with it.

[gaius]

It is front page news when it goes wrong, tho', look at NatWest. So objectively speaking, it is pretty reliable.