The concept of "writing COBOL in any language" does not refer to the quality of the code, only the shape of it. You can tell a coder's core language by a couple

The concept of "writing COBOL in any language" does not refer to the quality of the code, only the shape of it. You can tell a coder's core language by a couple of properties, such as seeing how their code is laid out on the page or how they use variables. For example, Fortran users have and do write very clean code, especially in the scientific community. However, you can always tell who has written Fortran because loop variables are almost always i,j,k,l The other such patterns include where you put block markers (braces, begin/end, if/fi), naming conventions for variables. You can always tell who's a Java programmer because they can only fit a couple of funcitno/variable names per line. But as I joke about Java and naming, that's another giveaway. How do people name variables, methods etc. You're right, though. It's also not hard to write bad code in any language stylistically consistent with the language and its community. I've seen so much bad C/C++ that was perfectly organized and structured C code.