COBOL was great for business. It was very wordy, but it also said exactly what you meant.
Move this to this.Move this to this. Divide this by this.
I could write 1000 lines in and 8 hour shift in that language.
I'm not saying it was the greatest language ever written, but it got the job done for a generation of programmers.
The code part, the Procedure Division, is great for writing business code that can be written by one programmer and then changed later by another. How code maintenance is done on C, Java, etc, these days escapes me, but it has to be a lot more difficult than it was in COBOL.
However, Y2K didn't require many changes to code. It did require changes to the Data Division, where each data field is described in agonizing detail. It's as if COBOL were written to make changes to the length of data fields as interconnected and difficult as possible, which was one reason it took so much work to deal with Y2K.
