As many are aware, Exercism.org is featuring various languages thematically this year as part of their 12in23 program (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2refhxXqePI ).

COBOL is being featured in July under the heading "Jurassic July". I have been contacted by Erik Schierboom of Exercism about the COBOL content. He has written as below, and if you're interested in contributing, please contact him via the forum <https://forum.exercism.org/u/ErikSchierboom>. (I do have an email address for him which, if you write to me directly, I'll supply..)

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Next month is Jurassic July, which will feature COBOL. I probably won’t have time to do an introduction video beforehand, but we will do the monthly introduction video. For that, I usually do write up a script for the actual introduction video and then use its contents. This time though, I’m severely limited in my time, so I was wondering if perhaps you could give me a starting point? Of course, you don’t need to write the actual contents and I can probably fairly quickly write up the “history” part of it, but the “Why it’s great” and “Standout features” sections are harder for me.

As inspiration, this is the current Clojure introduction:
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A brief introduction to Clojure

Developed by Rich Hickey with the goal of having a modern LISP that runs on the JVM and has great concurrency. Release in 2007
The name is a word play on “closure,” a key functional concept and Rich wanted to involve the letters C, L, and J, which stand for C#, Lisp and Java
Functional language
Dynamically typed
Dialect of LISP (TODO: what makes it a unique LISP)
Runs on the JVM, can compile to JS, run on CLR, compiles to Dart or even Bash or NodeJS using the Small Clojure Interpreter (SCI)
TODO: where is Clojure being used in the real world?

Why it’s great

Little syntax. Makes it easy to learn. Unambiguous
Immutable data structures (TODO: is it true that these are still very performant?)
Literal syntax for maps/sets/vectors
Runtime polymorphism via multimethods and protocols
Great JVM interop
Lovely community, their Slack is very friendly and welcoming
Clojure Spec data specification system (runtime, not compile-time), allows you to define structure of data, generate data, property-based testing and more

Standout features

Powerful macro system. Syntax sugar like threading macros are built on this
REPL core part of development workflow, not just for trying out thing, lookup docs
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