One of the great things about COBOL is that it is really simple to learn and use. I wrote the only two COBOL programs I ever have (and I certainly don't want to write any more, but they were easy) which exctracted data from a CODASYL database, after flicking through a COBOL textbook for a couple of hours. This was back in the 1980s.

The real problem with learning COBOL is the surrounding infrastructure, such as CICS. Now, that is a bugger.