I don’t think cobol is that difficult; the problem is that it runs on the mainframe, and that’s a whole different beast. Everything in the mainframe world is bo

I don’t think cobol is that difficult; the problem is that it runs on the mainframe, and that’s a whole different beast. Everything in the mainframe world is both expensive and vendor-supplied, so it’s difficult to learn outside the company, and sufficiently proprietary that you’re probably not going to transfer it well elsewhere. The language itself also encourages troublesome patterns, like all variables essentially being globally defined and untyped, procedure line numbers matter because of things like PERFORM A THROUGH B (which will execute all logic found between paragraph A and paragraph B)