I'm the author of the article, and I linked to the source of those numbers. The numbers seem reasonable to me too for the same reasons dcminter gave. One other

I'm the author of the article, and I linked to the source of those numbers. The numbers seem reasonable to me too for the same reasons dcminter gave. One other reason is COBOL is a language that lends itself to copying and pasting old code instead of writing subroutines, so that leads to a lot of lines of code.