COBOL does have one thing worth stealing, though, which is its data definition language and automatic parser generation facility in the core language.

Essentially, COBOL allows programmers to declare what their input file looks like and the compiler generates code that does all of the work of parsing the input and getting the data into the relevant variables.

Because COBOL comes from the (Big) Iron Age, this is all in terms of record-oriented files with fixed-width fields; a modern re-implementation of the concept would have to operate in terms of nested data structures (XML, JSON, sexps, etc.), which a Lisp-like's syntax is well-equipped to describe anyway.