I agree wholeheartedly that our profession discards the old in favor of the new to our detriment.

As an aside: it has become cliché to trash-talk COBOL, but think about this: software that was written between 1981-1989 (when I was writing COBOL), has been running critical business operations for 40 years now. How much of today's software will still be working in 2061?

I suspect that one contributing factor to COBOL's longevity is its handling of the variables used in monetary calculations, which allow it to precisely do two-point decimal arithmetic without fuss -- displaying dollars and cents values in a real world way. Too many general-purpose languages stick with integers, floats, and booleans, leaving it up to each project to struggle with IEEE-754 floating point angst.

Anyway, thanks for writing this.