As someone who has also done that, the most important thing in common is that they're programming languages. COBOL is a rigid and "square" language, I'm tempted

As someone who has also done that, the most important thing in common is that they're programming languages. COBOL is a rigid and "square" language, I'm tempted to call its style "COBOLic". Any language where the dots at the end of statements are crucial part of the logic flow can't be that similar to Python.