[watt]

> Writing an application in VB was several orders of magnitude cheaper

Order of magnitude is big deal, can you be more specific, did you mean 2 or 3 orders of magnitude? Or what exactly did you mean.

By this logic if writing an app in VB costs 20$ then COBOL equivalent cost 2000$ or 20 000$ ?

Ok, 20$ seems a bit too cheap, let's see, if developing VB app cost 400$. So COBOL equivalent would have cost either 40 000$ or 400 000$ ? Is that what you mean?

[abernard1]

> So COBOL equivalent would have cost either 40 000$ or 400 000$ ? Is that what you mean?

If he didn't mean that, I will say, yes, that is correct. You could do things in VB in a day that teams of people in COBOL would take months to do. Many things in VB are basically impossible to do in COBOL.

For some perspective, the reason why many Medicare reforms in the U.S. are not able to be implemented is because the government is unable to actually modify the software. The code that figures out how to bill Medicare is 50 years old, has 8 million lines of code and 1.5 million lines of assembly [1].

Another high profile failure was when CA couldn't furlough state employees because they couldn't figure out how to update the software (a feature, not a bug, for many).

[1] https://www.programmableweb.com/news/how-usds-modernizing-me...

[marcus_holmes]

I worked on the Y2K project for a large infrastructure company in the UK.

I was getting paid £50/hour to write VB code and maintain an Access database for the change control system that the COBOL devs used. They were getting paid around £500/hour, because most of them had been hauled out of retirement, to actually change the COBOL code. There were ~1000 people in the building I was in, around half of them devs, around half of those the COBOL guys. The project lasted ~2 years. So, back of envelope maths: 500x250x40x(52-4)x2=£480,000,000. That was just to pay the COBOL devs to amend the codebase for just the billing system.

So yeah, at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, I'd say.