I made a point, when I was still a student, of writing exactly one program in COBOL. It was not painless. I also wrote a few programs in other now-defunct languages. There was a great short story in an old edition of some generic computer magazine ("Datamation", perhaps?). The story was called "Privacy and the Gray Haired Programmer." Anyway, it was about this old guy who was being forced into retirement by younger bosses who considered him obsolete. He goes back to his office and issues a single query of the computer that corrupts the entire database. Nobody can fix it, but him. A few weeks later, his notice has been revoked and his boss has gotten Das Boot. He didn't put in the bugs. He simply found them and noted them. Whenever the issue of his forced retirement would arise, he'd make another query.
I'd sure love to find that story. Wish I could remember where I read it.
