On COBOL
If you don&#x27;t know COBOL, Wikipedia has a pretty excellent overview of a lot of its basic syntax here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;COBOL#Features" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;COBOL#Features</a><p>It&#x27;s very verbose, and includes a lot of opaque language that almost seems designed to confuse (I know it wasn&#x27;t actually, but it&#x27;s pretty bad). For example, an alphanumeric variable type is called a `PIC` for &quot;PICTURE&quot;. You can store an alphanumeric as a `PIC A`, or a numeric-only using a `PIC X`. Fields in a record get a &quot;level number&quot; that defines their behavior, and you just have to memorize which does what. 01 is a top-level record. 05 defines a subgroup. 88 is a conditional record.<p>There are many parts of the language that are clearly anti-features in retrospect. A 66 level number allows you to redefine a field in a previously defined record. Convenient in some cases maybe, but something that will clearly lead to maintainability problems as the shape of a record doesn&#x27;t match its original definition in code. Another example is that COBOL has a huge vocabulary, with the original idea that you could write things as much like English as possible (e.g. use a `GREATER THAN` instead of a `&gt;`), which is one of those things that probably seemed like a good idea at one point, but which every modern language has abandoned or is abandoning (through the use of linters, etc.).<p>The article makes quite a few salient points, but on the other hand, if there&#x27;s ever been a language that got almost everything wrong in about as objective a sense as you can get when speaking about these things, it&#x27;s this one.<p>Instead of inspiring the next generation of COBOL programmers, IMO there&#x27;s a good alternative argument to be made for getting a bunch of smart people together to write a transpiler that could transform huge legacy COBOL codebases to something more maintainable, like how the Go team transpiled from C to Go, and vanquishing this language to the history books. Obviously very difficult, but something that&#x27;d pay off in the long run.