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Why COBOL Isn't the Problem

This article is the first part of a two-part series on dealing with technical debt. The second part is here.

Unlike with cars, though, the knowledge of how to maintain complex computer systems has never really spread to non-specialists, and so these kinds of failures continue to take businesses and governments by surprise. To make a long story short, it was deliberately created and promoted by the United States of America's Department of Defense as a standard programming language that could be used across many different types of systems. After some serious study, the authors have decided that COBOL is no exception to this rule (it has some striking oddities compared to more standard programming languages, see below, but the strangeness doesn't increase the difficulty enough to matter).

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