Built to Last (COBOL in 2020)

Who knew one could fit so many forms of oppression into an article on a programming language?

I should say that I find it perfectly reasonable the organizations should write accounting systems in a language designed for writing accounting systems, rather than in one designed for porting Space Wars or writing moderately portable operating systems. However,

"users of COBOL could write the same command as:

MULTIPLY EARNINGS BY TAXRATE GIVING SOCIAL-SECUR ROUNDED.

As you can tell from the COBOL version, but probably not from the FORTRAN version, this line of code is a (simplified) example of how both languages could compute a social security payment and round the total to the penny. "

No, actually, I can't tell. Yes, I can infer the social security payment, but how far rounded I cannot.

I would also say that though COBOL has substantial advantages for those writing accounting systems, there are many other things one might want to do with a computer, and for some of them COBOL is just not that good. Like many people out there, I find myself writing a lot of small programs/scripts to put crummy data into a usable shape. For this Perl or Python--not great accounting languages--work very well; my impression is that COBOL wouldn't.

The other point not mentioned is the cost. COBOL vendors' license terms tend to make Larry Ellison look like Richard Stallman. I guess GNU Cobol may be good enough to learn on, but I suspect that few take that route.