For those not conversant in COBOL, it seems like a crufty ancient language. But consider this:
COBOL was one of the first languages actively supporting structured data.
COBOL has a large variety of data types and has strong typing.
COBOL has some interesting verbs, whose action is not duplicated in other languages.
COBOL was one of the earliest languages that strived for a standard among wildly differing processor architectures.
And yes, COBOL is wordy. It's what it is. But don't sell it short.