I give credit where it's due: In 1959 this was a breaktrough; made easy for non-technical people to support business operations using code that was easy to writ

I give credit where it's due: In 1959 this was a breaktrough; made easy for non-technical people to support business operations using code that was easy to write, easy to understand, massively better than assembly in this regard. Also, record definition and manipulation was an innovation in itself (in an era without RDBMS), not to mention the builtin support for "accounting" decimal arithmetic. It was really "Batteries-Included". But programming evolved and Cobol did not evolve at the speed of the times. In 1968 (Cobol-68) it was already outdated compared to IBM PL/1 (a big monster of a language, similar but much more powerful). And in 2017, "Try COBOL"? You mean, try a language where I need to deal with record access as if I were rolling my own DBMS system, with almost no module support, and copious need for copy/paste of code at every file (little chance of code reuse)? Where separation of concerns is almost zero? No, i think writing in INTERCAL-72, Brainf_ck or LOLCODE would be more fun.