I started writing in COBOL in 1976. I wrote a lot of code and even started teaching COBOL in the local community college. The language is pretty simple, although wordy. I think that COBOL code would be pretty obvious to a coder today. They might not be able to code in it, but they should be able to follow the flow. The advantage of COBOL was that it was closer to machine code. A statement in COBOL translates to one or a few instructions of machine language. COBOL was a sort of assembly language. This made it run fast and efficiently on the big iron IBM mainframes. Remember that a machine with a meg or less memory had to run hundreds of terminals serving users at the same time at a clock speed measured in in a few millions of CPS. My last job before I retired was translating COBOL to Java. The COBOL code always ran faster than the Java classes that replaced them.