Seems like COBOL is getting a bit more into the news lately. Cloudflare <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/16/cloudflare_cobol/> is now offering a service to compile COBOL code into ... wait for it ... WebAssembly. This is not for running in the browser, but in their “Workers” service. As for the virtues (or lack of them) of COBOL, let me just point out that it was originally created for coding “business applications”. But just a decade or two after it came out, businesses started making more and more use of SQL databases. Nowadays we interface to these by dynamically constructing SQL statements, a technique which requires languages that have good string-manipulation facilities. Which are conspicuously lacking in COBOL. So a “business-oriented” language no longer matches with current “business” needs.