If you’re a developer you’re probably familiar with the idea that you will make a hack or a demo project just to demonstrate that the concept works and then management takes it and runs and next thing you know, your ugly hack is the production code.

Well, I guess this is because it’s the way things have been since the dawn of computing. According to the most recent episode of Red Hat’s Compiler podcast COBOL (the ancient language that still runs the key systems in the modern world) was only ever intended to be a stopgap language. It wasn’t meant to become so widely used.

It’s a great episode that talks about the past, present, and future of the language.