COBOL's biggest asset is the readability factor. Forget everything else about it. In business, maintainability is far more important than 'smart coding'.<p>I have COBOL programs sitting in my 'archives' hard drive which I probably haven't looked at since I wrote them in the mid-1980s. But I venture to say that I could dig one out and see exactly what it was for, and how it was done, in minutes. And that's after a lapse of 30-something years.<p>ASIDE: <i>COBOL just isn't a very interesting language to computer science type persons because it's not made for solving computer science type problems.</i><p>It's not as boring a language as you might think. I once coded an 8080 disassembler in COBOL. Yes, it was pretty slow but it actually worked. I didn't bother to upgrade it later to a Z80 disassembler, so I stopped using it.