There have been some very interesting comments made in these comments. Having used COBOL to write communications and networking programs, I found the version we

There have been some very interesting comments made in these comments. Having used COBOL to write communications and networking programs, I found the version we used to be useful in the context of the work being done. I know of people who so hate the language that you could offer them $1,000,000 an hour to work on a project and they would refuse. Others would just as happily take up the offer. What I do find interesting is the attitude of some who classify COBOL as ancient (etc) and have not yet realised that there are a number of major modern languages that are the spiritual descendants of COBOL. These being ADA, Java, C#, C++ and the rest of their ilk. They each have a place to play in the computing world, but they each are the wrong language for many purposes. Too oft I find, many programmers know one or two languages and they are the worse off for that. Different languages give different insights into specific problem domains. Every language allows some things to be done easily and other things to be done hard. Decades ago now, as CompSci undergraduates, we were expected to learn (or at least use) every available language, from Fortran to COBOL, Algol 60 to Lisp, assembler to Simula, Snobol to Pascal, Basic to Algol 68, etc., etc., etc. These days, undergraduates seem to be taught one or two languages and that's it. It shows up in their later inability to solve certain kinds of problems in a problem space specific way.