I worked on Y2K remediation fixing COBOL programs I'd never seen before at a large oil company. It's an easy-to-understand language by design. The complexity of

I worked on Y2K remediation fixing COBOL programs I'd never seen before at a large oil company. It's an easy-to-understand language by design. The complexity of dealing with the apps/jobs wasn't the code or the impact analysis, but just the volume of work -- the endless test cases. The nice thing about those systems was that because they were financial apps, success was pretty black or white. Either things balanced and agreed with production or didn't. But sooo many green bar reports. Killed many green bar trees in '98. My theory is that if you like programming, preferences aside, you'll appreciate the beauty in any language, COBOL's no exception once you grok it. May not be sexy but I've seen sexier languages come and go in 20+ years.