Still plowing through this 2002 COBOL text I picked up from HPB for $3 in a fit of questionable judgment. It's interesting, in a WWI tank sort of way. First, Big Iron. Rivets everywhere. Nobody really knew what they were doing. So large and so, so obtuse

But, at least in its day it was somewhat effective in its intended role. That 60+ years later we have many faster, more versatile, more capable replacements doesn't change the fact that in its intended role, it still does the job. There are some aspects I find fascinating

Explicitly breaking a source file into sections - data sources, record formats, environmental info, source metadata. The huge set of reserved words and that's even before you get to the VAX & IBM extensions. Math is ... special.

String literal continuation across lines is simultaneously almost like FORTRAN but somehow brain-meltingly worse (odd number of quotation marks). So many words. SO WORDY. It's like being in a managers meeting with that one guy who talks for an hour to express a one-sentence idea