I wouldn't call it beautiful, but COBOL is a fairly capable language. I used Microsoft COBOL on the original IBM PC (twin floppy) in 1985 to produce a realtime

I wouldn't call it beautiful, but COBOL is a fairly capable language. I used Microsoft COBOL on the original IBM PC (twin floppy) in 1985 to produce a realtime multiuser data collection system in a factory. This interfaced to various machines and devices using a custom TSR* routine written in x86 assembler. COBOL was chosen by the customer as they were running an IBM System 36, and the implementation was capable of calling the assembly code almost directly. Each compile would take around 20 minutes, which teaches you to be careful with the syntax! When the source code got beyond 64k, we had to build the app in sections as that's all IBM Edit at the time could handle at one time. As the article shows, COBOL is quite verbose, so 64k isn't that large! In later years we updated to Microfocus COBOL which was much better than the Microsoft version. I can't imagine any modern programmer having any problems learning COBOL sufficiently well in a few days. It was my third language after BASIC and assembler. [*] TSR = Terminate and Stay Resident program, which you loaded into MSDOS first, prior to running the main (COBOL) program. A very poor-man's "multi-tasking".