Some transaction you perform today will touch a system running on COBOL. I've come across finance and retail systems that have been running for almost as long a

Some transaction you perform today will touch a system running on COBOL. I've come across finance and retail systems that have been running for almost as long as I've been alive, some of it on original hardware [0]. The reason we don't develop anything new in it isn't because it's awful (though it is awful), it's because most of the important things we wrote in it are still working. [0] Sometimes this is better than the 'N layers of crufty consultant supplied virtualisation' model. Sometimes it is not.