The selling point is that it looks good to non-professionals and people that should know better. There is a really small class of problems that it actually has

The selling point is that it looks good to non-professionals and people that should know better. There is a really small class of problems that it actually has some use. In reality, it makes easy problems easy, and everything else complicated or impossible. COBOL programmers had to use JSP since control flow in COBOL is ugly as hell, and because of a lack of good tools. I guess the same idea that spawned COBOL that drives this; Just about anyone that does not drool (that much) can actually build highly complicated systems. In COBOLs case, it turned out that it's really really hard to write good COBOL systems. Because it's really really hard to build systems in any language. I could go on about information theory and whatnot, but let's say that only a fool would do surgery with a butter knife.