I learned COBOL in the same course as SNOBOL. Really loved the latter, as it was the first string manipulation language I'd seen. Of course, structured language purists were appalled by its having a GOTO at the end of every single line. Heh heh!
The thing I couldn't stand about COBOL was that the tiniest syntax error resulted in pages of error messages. It was like, "Hey, twit! You forgot a single '.' As your reward, we're going to spit out a complete dump of the entire core memory this machine holds - all 32KB of it at 4 bytes per line. Take that!"
Well, at least you never had to worry about having an infinite supply of scratch paper, when you had a 2" thick stack of 17x11" fanfold paper that was blank on the back.
I do miss my fan fold paper, although I was a Fortran man in those days.