Below. Original message massively abridged. 

On Dec 13, 2011, at 8:01 PM, "David T. Lewis" <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:

Context: WRT an industrial BCPL application. 

> The application is
> fast, reliable, and flexible, and to this day it remains a great
> improvement over its successors.

I had to read your reply again in order to catch this line. Well done. I see what you did there!

I read recently that a study done on enterprise apps written in many different languages found the most defects per capita in Java apps. This didn't come as a surprise, but what did: the apps with the lowest defect rates were written in COBOL. 

The researchers seemed to scratch their heads and proclaim "...well, I guess there've been people grinding bugs off of the COBOL code for thirty years."

After the horror stories that I read about on comp.lang.cobol (I have strange hobbies? Also, some of those COBOL guys have a lot to teach) I think I nearly fell out of my chair laughing and achieved something approaching enlightenment;)