I like Perl for small codebases heavily focused on manipulating text. It has first-class support for regular expressions, which means you can make them more rea

I like Perl for small codebases heavily focused on manipulating text. It has first-class support for regular expressions, which means you can make them more readable in addition to doing more things with them more conveniently, and it largely stays out of my way. COBOL, on the other hand, is a domain-specific language for a domain most people here have no experience with: Software involving fixed-format input and fixed-point numerical calculations. It would be amazing if some language integrated a clear way to describe modern, recursively-defined input formats with the same degree of language support COBOL has for its data definition language. Go is still too verbose, sadly. Fortran suffers from FORTRAN, by which I mean if you mention Fortran to people they think of 1960s-era mainframe software with no string support, column-oriented fixed formatting, and GOTO use by people who'd never even heard of Dijkstra. Modern Fortran is not like that; sadly, much like Lisp, they never changed the name, so old ideas linger. (This is also true of Cobol.)