COBOL was designed in 1959 by a committee led by Grace Hopper, with the explicit goal of making business programming readable by non-programmers. The language used English-like syntax — MOVE TOTAL-PRICE TO INVOICE-AMOUNT — on the theory that management might actually read the source. Management did not read the source. Programmers, however, wrote enormous quantities of it, and the resulting codebase — payroll systems, banking transactions, government benefits calculations — proved extraordinarily difficult to replace. Estimates suggest over 800 billion lines of COBOL remain in production. The language processes an estimated $3 trillion in commerce daily. The average COBOL programmer is now in their fifties. Every few years a major institution announces a COBOL modernisation programme; most of these programmes eventually produce a new layer of abstraction that calls the original COBOL underneath.
