[goatinaboat]

it's well worth the effort on the programmer's part

It's worth it if you have all the supporting pieces in place. For example if your OS provides record-oriented I/O and your hardware platform provides dedicated processors for accelerating I/O, then you can write a very small, efficient program to, say, calculate today's interest rate and apply it to millions of accounts. But if you don't have those things then you need to write a lot more code and/or have another program (e.g. a database server) to try and emulate them in software, and it will be slower because it has the overhead of calling between components rather than being tightly integrated.

[Annatar]

COBOL I learned on ran under MS-DOS, which does not have record oriented I/O, and it was fast. Very fast.