I have some COBOL on IBM experience; I did a short stint about 15 years ago for a large grocery store chain. There is no way that COBOL is more reliable and ma

I have some COBOL on IBM experience; I did a short stint about 15 years ago for a large grocery store chain. There is no way that COBOL is more reliable and maintainable -- it's effectively equivalent to programming in old-school line-number BASIC. The place I worked at was extremely strict on reviews, process, and testing. Every line was reviewed extensively by a group of people and if you did a SQL query you always accessed the fields in alphabetical order. It was that kind of strictness. Some of this was because the consequences of a mistake are pretty severe (Hawaii doesn't get a shipment of groceries) most of it was because the technology was so antiquated. What I can do now in a week would take 4 months to do that in that environment. I was one of the few new hires with actual education and experience in software development. The majority of new hires were people in their mid-thirties who were looking to change careers from trades, etc. The company was specifically looking for smart people that they could train extensively in house. Almost nothing you learn outside of that environment is applicable inside and vice-versa. The best I can describe it as a complete parallel evolution of technology. The technology is similar and yet also completely alien. Connecting to the mainframe didn't mean you were editing the code live. It's exactly like shelling into a remote Linux machine to compile your code. You didn't work locally because there's nothing that is local.