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>programmers that keep banks like this running are an enormously underestimated "bus factor" for many of the world's economies, and what kind of back-up plans they have for such a scenario.

Hmm, makes me wonder about potential similar situation with APL programmers - a language I know quite a few large companies use.

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Wow, I'd forgotten APL existed, my finger-in-the-air sense is that while APL occupied/occupies some important places in infrastructure the actual number of lines of code (and so, roughly, maintenance effort required) is significantly smaller ? I'm not doubting that what it does is important but just thinking that the size of the installed base that will, in time, need to be replaced is quite a bit smaller than COBOL.

Are you joking to compare number of lines of apl with cobol. Come on. One page of apl can do thousand.

Lol, I never considered how hard it would be to compare APL codebases to other codebases. It's probably also a lot more difficult to read someone else's APL cole, given the symbol overloadin. In which case porting it is even harder beyond the somewhat-quantifyable difference in "code density" between langages would suggest

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