[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...