Because you have the same mess plus all the mess and hard to debug incompatibilities and weirdness, added by the translator. What people don’t get about cobol

Because you have the same mess plus all the mess and hard to debug incompatibilities and weirdness, added by the translator. What people don’t get about cobol is that it is a language you can learn in a few days. It is meant to be readable for non-technical users so Cobol itself is not the issue. Once you get past the meaning of sections, and the implicit defaults that are different from modern programming languages, it is way easier than, say, C.