Why nobody knows COBOL any more…
First of all, because COBOL — COmmon Business Oriented Language — is a language for business people, not for programmers. It’s designed such that a businessperson with no knowledge of code understands what’s going on. Which means that the wellbeing of the programmer behind the code isn’t a priority.
COBOL has a bunch of syntactical oddities that make it palatable for business, but not for hardcore nerds. Like the fact that it doesn’t have any functions or subroutines — instead, there are divisions, sections, paragraphs, and statements. Very much to the disgust of systems programming pioneers in the 1970s.
“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” — Edsger W. Dijkstra
The coronavirus pandemic is imperiling more than lives and livelihoods. It's also leading to lawsuits.
Workers are suing companies. Businesses are suing insurers. Prison inmates and migrants in detention, abortion providers and gun shop owners are suing federal and state governments.
Colleges, cruise lines and even China have been among the targets of lawsuits seeking damages for the COVID-19 calamity. And the nation's notoriously litigious society is just getting started.
“This early litigation is really, from our vantage point, the tip of the iceberg,” says Harold Kim, president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform. “The level of litigation could really go into so many different directions.”
Sometimes theres a Lucky (?) Plaintiff who gets rich too.A long time ago my late uncle Ernest told me that only two people in this world ever get rich - politicians and lawyers.