"JJ" from Doonesbury?
My point was that Fortran made positive sense in equation terms and Cobol was so highly structured and didn't make any specific sense reading it. You could look at Fortran and understand in real terms what was going on. Cobol needed so much structure that you couldn't follow the logic without a lot of work. A comma out of place in Cobol didn't stand out. Any symbol error in Fortran just jumped out at you.
Well, the whole idea behind COBOL was that it should approximate "natural" language and would have greater portability between machines; of course, since it was designed by a US DoD committee, it's exactly as clunky as you think something designed by a DoD committee would be.
I'd still kind of like to learn FORTRAN or ALGOL or one of the old hoary ones (other than LISP, which I picked up in college).