I love these guys. COBOL is much maligned, but it does what it was designed to do, and does it well. Business rules generally don't need anything fancier, and

I love these guys. COBOL is much maligned, but it does what it was designed to do, and does it well. Business rules generally don't need anything fancier, and the data transfer model (IIRC) matches up well with the paper-based systems that it replaced - so it is straightforward to reason about. Though I think they were lucky to employ whizzes that were actually whizzes. Compiling COBOL to C would be pretty straightforward, but making a debugging for the original language less so. Though, I guess if you just kept a copy of the original source line and line-number, and your execution model was isomorphic to the original, stepping through, and debugging messages could be pretty straightforward, too. One last point: the article says the resulting code was slow; but Moore's Law will have fixed this, so they didn't have to.