Why is verbosity such a bad thing?

oh the names aren't long. cobol has keyword alternatives for all operators and all numbers up to 20. since the language was designed for non-programmers, code in the wild follows no paradigm and mixes these alternatives freely. names are usually kept as short as possible.

there's also a lot of boilerplate required for each file wrt the actual structure of the sections, assembly style. sure most of this can be automated with tooling but there's no tooling available. the cobol people have mainly worked in their own sphere and not been included in the tooling explosion of the last 15 years.

here's an example of some well-written cobol. most of it is nowhere close to this consistent, or source-controlled for that matter.

keyword count is a quick but bad metric of language complexity. thanks to all the alternative syntaxes cobol allows, it has around 300 keywords.