Don't confuse "easy to read" with "easy to understand" with "easy to reason about" with "easy to prove" 

Long term  support is not about the language, it is about the ability to take someone new to become suitably engaged with the system to diagnose, repair and extend.

To reason about cobol programs you need to reason about them in the context of not just the programming language, but also the compiler peculiarities, the o/s environment etc. 

This is a *lot* easier in Haskell than in most environments - not perfect. Haskell has strictly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty that you know you have to engage with, in other languages the doubt and uncertainty is no where nearly as well contained.

On 1 Sep 2015, at 09:49, Alberto G. Corona <agocorona@gmail.com> wrote:

COBOL is verbose but at least it is easy to understand. but the current practices in enterprise java programming make legacy Java code verbose, complicated, low level and impossible to understand without profuse documentation, diagrams, web references etc. That documentation will disappear sooner or latter...

2015-09-01 10:40 GMT+02:00 Miguel Mitrofanov <miguelimo38@yandex.ru>:
That's not very different from "being forced to use COBOL by your employer". Surely, I'll use one in this case (or quit), but it doesn't make it superior.

01.09.2015, 11:30, "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org>:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 4:12 AM M Farkas-Dyck <strake888@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 31/08/2015, Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> wrote:
>>> Of course not. There are application areas for which COBOL is clearly
>>> superior to - and hence more worthy than - Java. Or Haskell.
>> Name one.
>
> Maintaining ~50-year old government systems that are written in COBOL.
> ,
>
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--
Alberto.
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