[jrockway]

This just sounds like survivorship bias to me. I am sure there is a lot of junk COBOL that killed the companies that relied on it. Nobody cares today because the business is gone.

Something that's interesting to think about is that because the cost of changing COBOL is so high now, only the most important change requests actually get implemented. Compare that to a team that can develop and ship a change the same day; their efficiency leads to more requests that end up being bad ideas. The Pentagon has designed a system to ensure that only the most well-thought-out ideas make it into production, they just went about it in a very strange way.