Or, conversely, there was an old saw: “Make it possible to write programs in English, and you will find that most programmers cannot write in English.”
That being said, the real risk with old COBOL code is that it’s likely to be a tangled mass of spaghetti. When I was taking the COBOL course at my junior college, they were at least using a modern enough version that it was possible (and required by the professor) to write code in a structured manner without resorting to GO TO.
Still, COBOL is a hell of a lot more readable by default than, let’s say, Java, C, or Perl.
Ha! I am reminded of the funny & satirical “The Devil’s DP Dictionary” by the late, great Stan Kelly-Bootle, copies of which can yet be acquired I am happy to see. As a kind of Dr Seuss of computer literature among many other talents, he coined such terms as WOM (write-once memory) and the floppy drum. A poem from it is best read aloud (though maybe not at work) to the Sound of Music tune “My Favorite Things”):
Randomly accessed, my girl is delirious;
I even consoled her one day on the Sirius;
The printer monitor did then overswing;
It took away one of my favorite things!
There are some good ones in the Jargon File as well, like the SED (smoke-emitting diode), the NED (noise-emitting diode, which tends to go “pop”), and the LER (light-emitting resistor). Somewhere (maybe Byte or Creative Computing?) there was mention of a black-hole diode, a device with a single terminal that is useful for implementing a bit bucket.
Of course, strictly speaking, an incandescent bulb is an LER, but the term is really meant to refer to a case of Ohm’s Law being broken.
