Heard an excellent COBOL talk this summer that really helped me to understand it. The speaker was fairly confident that COBOL wasn't going away anytime soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7Q7u0pZyQ&list=PLxeenGqMmm...

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pixl97 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In my experience working with large financial institutions and banks, there is plenty of running COBOL code that is around the average age of HN posters. Where as a lot of different languages code is replaced over time with something better/faster COBOL seems to have a staying power in financial that will ensure it's around a very very long time.

	▲	brightball 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I wasn’t aware of this until that talk, but COBOL essentially being both the logic and the database together makes it very sticky.

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rramadass 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Both Fortran and COBOL will be here long after many of the current languages have disappeared. They are unique to their domains viz. Fortran for Scientific Computing and COBOL for Business Data Processing with a huge amount of installed code-base much of it for critical systems.

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elzbardico 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Don't know about COBOL, but FORTRAN and Ada definitely would survive an Extinction Level Event on earth.

Plenty of space based stuff running Ada and maybe some FORTRAN.

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rramadass an hour ago | parent [-]

The key to understanding their longevity lies in the fact that they were the earliest high-level languages invented at a time when all software was built for serious long-lived stuff viz. Banking, Insurance, Finance, Simulations, Numerical Analysis, Embedded etc. Computing was strictly Science/Mathematics/Business and so a lot of very smart domain experts and programmers built systems to last from the ground up.

	▲	SoftTalker an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The computers themselves were also so expensive that most businesses did not buy them, they leased them.