>From a legibility point of view COBOL wins hands-down.

Let me guess, you are/were a COBOL programmer, right?

>And my view is that C and its variants lose hands-down.

Of the commonly used high level languages, C and C++ are generally considered to be closest to the hardware. In .NET, C# and Managed C++ are generally considered to produce the most efficient IL code (the machine language of the CLR "Virtual Machine".

As far as legibility is concerned, I prefer to work in as high level a language as possible that does not hinder my freedom to express myself in code. In .NET, C# is that language.