The only thing that makes COBOL difficult is that it is very _very_ opinionated. A good IDE actually takes quite a bit of the pain away. At the end of the day,

The only thing that makes COBOL difficult is that it is very _very_ opinionated. A good IDE actually takes quite a bit of the pain away. At the end of the day, it’s just a thin layer over assembly. I’m 2012-13 I wrote a Java -> COBOL bridge to directly invoke ‘MainFrame transactions’ from a JVM. Unlike the IBM solution, we never did anything with XML or text parsing and did everything using bit and integer manipulation. Java types and fields were annotated with their COBOL Record equivalents. Initially we used reflection which was fast but being Cowboys we made it even faster by using CGLib and writing custom classes at run time that could be JIT compiled. This process was absolutely fascinating and it really took my career to the next level because a deeply understood what was happening in memory in both languages afterwards. It saved the company millions in license fees and we went from latency measured in seconds to below 8ms to invoke code.