So, I graduated college this past June and have since started working as a software engineer for a large financial institution. For now, I've been placed on a team of developers where the majority of work is done on mainframes and where most software is written in COBOL.

Today is the last of a 7 week-long "Mainframe Bootcamp" during which I've been introduced to COBOL as well as TSO, JCL, DB2, CICS and MQ. Thus far, I'd say the class has picked up the language fairly quickly, however we've yet to fully grasp the intricacies of development using our company's heavily customized mainframe tools. Generally mundane processes, such as compilation and promotion between environments have been, IMO, rendered tantalizingly complex. It's all really quite tedious and boring. IBM's documentation monopoly hasn't helped, either.

To the point - I question whether COBOL's seemingly polarizing reputation can be somewhat attributed to the environment in which it's usually developed/deployed more-so than the semantic's of the language itself.