Yup! It gets even worse: I got stuck for a year once working on COBOL software that only ran on Solaris, depended on Micro Focus's buggy and slow $3000 compile

Yup! It gets even worse: I got stuck for a year once working on COBOL software that only ran on Solaris, depended on Micro Focus's buggy and slow $3000 compiler, did binary searches across flat files and depended on Unix calls like mmap(). I got it up and running long enough to see how the code worked so that it could be rewritten in Pascal (this was chosen because that's what the guy I was working with preferred). COBOL is a terrible, verbose language that doesn't even have local variables. It belongs on the ash-heap of computing history, not in any project that should be maintained today.