The Myth of the COBOL Monolith: Civilization on Spaghetti Code

When people talk about COBOL, they imagine towering monoliths of code, vast and inscrutable fortresses of logic, engineered with the discipline of NASA’s Apollo program. The truth is both funnier and more terrifying: much of this COBOL was written by developers not so different from the junior coders of today — green, under pressure, and often guessing their way forward.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, “software engineering” as a discipline barely existed. Documentation was sparse, testing was rudimentary, and deadlines were brutal. Programmers were told to “make it work,” not “make it elegant.” That means the code still running in the bowels of the NYSE, the IRS, or a pension fund in São Paulo might have started life as a student project by someone fresh out of a Programming 101 class in a community college in Bumfuck, Alabama.

And yet, those lines of ALL CAPS COBOL endured. They survived not because they were flawless, but because nobody dared replace them. Each patch, each workaround, each kludge layered on top became part of the sacred foundation. The system worked — or at least, it didn’t fail catastrophically — and that was enough to keep the lights on.

We joke about “legacy” as if it means “ancient but noble.” In reality, much of legacy code is just old spaghetti that got lucky. The intern’s quick hack became canon. The half-understood routine became mission-critical. And over decades, these fragments fused into the backbone of civilization’s most sensitive systems.

This is the paradox: the global economy relies on code that would make modern reviewers scream. It isn’t elegant, it isn’t pretty, and in many cases it isn’t even understandable. But it works. The stock market clears trades. Social Security sends checks. Airlines issue tickets. Not because of some COBOL cathedral, but because of a patchwork quilt stitched together by generations of programmers, from interns to lifers, all doing just enough to keep it running.

So the next time someone romanticizes COBOL as the unshakable pillar of computing, remember this: it’s not marble, it’s duct tape. Civilization rests on spaghetti code — and somehow, miraculously, it hasn’t boiled over yet.