Actually, it could be an interesting exercise to write a non-trivial program in the original version of COBOL (or BASIC or FORTRAN); indeed, the people who crea

Actually, it could be an interesting exercise to write a non-trivial program in the original version of COBOL (or BASIC or FORTRAN); indeed, the people who created these now “old” languages were not stupid; rather, they had specific design criteria in mind, and the languages were constructed to fit those criteria. However “brain-damaged” these languages may seem today compared to more recent alternatives, I also think that an average student or an office worker would have a much better chance to casually learn programming in one of these simple “old” languages to a degree which would make the skill useful to them in their daily tasks, than to try, and fail, to attain practical level of command of, say, Python or JavaScript.