I don't see what there is such difficult in a COBOL program to have to take a programmer out of retirement. The syntax may be different and old, but still there

I don't see what there is such difficult in a COBOL program to have to take a programmer out of retirement. The syntax may be different and old, but still there is no reason why a programmer can't learn it. I mean, I know people of my age (30 years) that work on companies that still maintain COBOL programs, and they learned it (some of this went to work for these companies right after high school). It's not that is rocket science, like it is not BASIC. The most difficult thing is getting a development environment set up, but a company that maintains such programs can use virtual machines and test systems. There are even companies that provide you "cloud" IBM AS/400. Anyway, what I meant is that normal companies are not Google, you find a small department of developers (in case of small companies, only one) that does everyting, from fixing the printers to developing the programs that are useful to automate and do the job the company needs to do. I've seen companies build even systems that manage an entire production plant in house with a complex business logic, something that not even commercial software that cost thousands of dollars do! With no budget, and thanks to simple programming languages (in the past was BASIC, today I say that it's python) companies write programs that helps them speed up the work, that may be an ugly file of 10.000 lines of code with few comments, copied/pasted blocks, classes with poor or no encapsulation, but that work. Saying that they are bad programs because they don't follow SOLID pricniples, or they don't do TDD or have a CI set up, or they are on a folder in file server instead of a git repository, to me is stupid. A bad program to me is a program that doesn't work, a program that has bugs, a program that doesn't solve the problem it was designed to solve.