When I used to ride the train to work a few years ago, one of the happiest appearing people I met on the train was a young (30 something) COBOL programmer. He was examining a green-bar fan-fold printout of COBOL code that was part of the back-end of a gas station point-of-sale system. He told me that there had been an issue with a transaction the night before and he was going to try to solve it that day.