COBOL can be worth a good laugh...
Back in 94, I was working on "marketing simulations" for a car company's commercial division. A typical scenario, would have a batch pgm take the "94 sports package" of car X and move it to the 95 models, on Oracle DB.
My first run at this took me 6 weeks, using PL/SQL, coding/testing/interviewing the users/injecting weird test data. Stable and worked like a charm.
Others programmers followed, but were much quicker. 2 weeks to code to completion for similar tasks, to my 6.
Then things didn't work so well. Turned out PL/SQL, for everyone else, was flakey and error prone.
Lessons were learned. Decisions were made. The second phase of the project, 3 months long, would be using reliable, portable, proven, technology. Plain old C.
From bitter personal experience, I humbly pointed out that C had no inbuilt strings, was tricky to use, not Oracle-friendly, too powerful and most of all utterly unsuited for my rather green coworkers (C virgins all). This was 94, remember: no C++, frameworks, Linux, stackoverflow and few competent C programmers in the business world.
Fresh from mainframes a few years before, I suggested... COBOL. Got a great big laugh out of everyone, but I didn't care much as I wasn't working on that feature anyway. A wizkid consultant was gonna write some C libraries and my concerns were dismissed as groundless.
Three months later, as phase 2 was about to wrap and I was leaving to join a new employer, our code wizard's C libraries were nearing the point where other programmers could try using them.
Unsexy COBOL would have been done twice over ;-)