I chose Cobol because my personal experience with it was terrible: in the first (or perhaps second, not sure anymore) year of University, we were supposed to write Cobol programs, but had no access to a Cobol compiler and related environments, so that the whole thing was just purely theoretical, a brain experiment, so to speak, with no chance to actually run a program. I guess this is not something against Cobol per se, but more about bad organization in our tech school. Fortunately, I could write (simple) programs in at least three other programming languages at the time (Basic, Pascal and C), so that was not too crippling; if it had not been for this other experience with programming, I think it might have dissuaded me completely from studying IT. Having said that, even if we had had a Cobol compiler, I think I would have hated it: so verbose, so inefficient (in terms of code writing efficiency, that is), so boring, so picky, and so on. The funny thing, though, is that I completed that teaching unit with a more than decent mark, I still don't understand how this could happen. Anyway, I'm really happy that I've never had to use it again afterwards.

If Cobol had not been in the list, I could have chosen a couple more which I really don't like: PHP and Javascript for a start, and, to a lesser extent and for different reasons, Java. Nowadays, I would also really avoid assembly, but that's because it has been so many years I did some that I would have to learn again almost everything.

The others languages are more or less fine to me, to different degrees. My favorites are, of course and in no particular order, Perl (5) and Perl 6.