For some inexplicable reason COBOL doesn't get much love from LtU. But COBOL turns 50 some time this year and we owe a tip of the hat to this venerable language behind so many large institutions.

The Guardian understands.

According to Michael Coughlan, a lecturer at the University of Limerick, one of Cobol's perceived drawbacks is its verbosity. But he reckons that's also one of its strengths. "It's not just a write-only language," he says. "You can come back years later and understand the code."

This opinion is shared by Mike Gilpin, of Forrester, who is an ex-Cobol programmer. "Cobol is one of the few languages written in the last 50 years that's readable and understandable," he says. And he's scathing about the readability of more fashionable languages, such as PHP and Java: "Modern programming languages are ridiculously hard to understand."