A Political/Economic magazine came yesterday. I’m a Life Subscriber. Complaining about the state of the country, it used New Jersey’s plaint about its COBOL-related problems as an example of “The Rot.” It probably wasn’t COBOL related. It was probably related to much newer Web-related code. But so be it.

Everyone loves to blame COBOL. And almost all of them know nothing about it.

But the part that hurt was that the writer compare COBOL to Sanskrit. Now that takes a fair amount of ignorance.

COBOL is a dialect of the English language. It reads like English. Most of us, in the US, read English pretty well.

Sanscrit? Not so much. The number of people in our city of 30,000 who can read sanscrit is probably under 50 (10?).

There is a longer rant in there. Not for the moment. But, for maintainability and verifiability, it would be hard to do better than COBOL in countries where English language skills are common.