I wrote a ton of COBOL (mainframe and MicroFocus COBOL on AIX) back in the day in my early IT career (late 90s, early 2000s) around the Y2K conversion. It was

I wrote a ton of COBOL (mainframe and MicroFocus COBOL on AIX) back in the day in my early IT career (late 90s, early 2000s) around the Y2K conversion. It was a fun language because you could pick up someone else's code and be productive right away. It was hard (but not impossible) to do things in COBOL that weren't pretty straight forward. One of the big drawbacks we had though, and this may have changed since, was that COBOL wanted every variable and structure to be fixed length and defined up at the top of the program. So it was not really a good fit for the modern world of the web, JSON, etc. where you don't always know the length or structure of your input in advance. The versions of COBOL we used wouldn't have been able to process a blob of JSON and pull out a particular key for example without having the full JSON structure defined beforehand. I always joke w/my colleagues that my copy of "COBOL For Dummies" on my bookshelf is as good as my 401k as a retirement plan.