[wredue]

>Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today.

I worked on enterprise cobol for nearly 20 years and can generally attest that cobol code from the 60s is absolutely nothing at all what you’re describing.

It’s brittle and constantly breaks, requiring 24/7 on call support for people to deal with issues so it doesn’t hold up the next days work.

It was not written with any semblance of engineering prowess. Most cobol written in the 60s was written by business managers, not programmers.

The reason it stays running isn’t because it’s battle hardened. It’s because nobody in their right mind would ever pay to untangle the unfettered mess.