As I was sitting here yesterday evening it came to me. Musk keeps using these guys because they’re willing to do things these other more experienced people are not. I want to be crystal clear: This isn’t something I’m reporting. I believe it’s just the most logical reading of the available evidence.
Basically, people who are a bit older know that it’s not worth committing a crime because their boss said so, but a bunch of interns who don’t know better are willing.
Cobol is heavily used in the financial industry for a reason. It’s actually excellent for processing financial data at scale and it’s well supported. Many of these institutions attempt to swap out parts of these systems with modern languages or runtimes; these projects often fail because they’re simply too slow or the new systems crash too often.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to do so, just that it’s not worth it.