Rather COBOL is a living fossil? And today's Fortran is the FORTRAN family with horizontal gene transfer from the Algol lineage of programming languages.

Both languages have their standards updated still, latest year in both cases was 2023.

Fortran is one of the reasons OpenCL lost to CUDA, and now even AMD and Intel have finally Fortran support on their own stacks, not Khronos based.

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-fortran

Whereas Cobol, even has cloud and microservices.

https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...

https://aws.amazon.com/mainframe/

Incredible how being monetary relevant keeps some languages going.

Also note how the beloved UNIX and C are from 1971 - 73, only about 10 younger than COBOL.

Can COBOL be called a living fossil?

I mean, programming languages do not live; and they do not "die", per se, either. Just the usage may go down towards 0.

COBOL would then be close to extinction. I think it only has a few niche places in the USA and perhaps a very few more areas, but I don't think it will survive for many more decades to come, whereas I think C or python will be around in, say, three decades still.

> family with horizontal gene transfer

Well, you refer here to biology; viruses are the most famous for horizontal gene transfer, transposons and plasmids too. But I don't think these terms apply to software that well. Code does not magically "transfer" and work, often you have to adjust to a particular architecture - that was one key reason why C became so dynamic. In biology you basically just have DNA, if we ignore RNA viruses (but they all need a cell for their own propagation) 4 states per slot in dsDNA (A, T, C, G; here I exclude RNA, but RNA is in many ways just like DNA, see reverse transcriptase, also found in viruses). So you don't have to translate much at all; some organisms use different codons (mitochondrial DNA has a few different codon tables) but by and large what works in organism A, works in organism B too, if you just look to, say, wish to create a protein. That's why "genetic engineering" is so simple, in principle: it just works if you put genes into different organisms (again, some details may be different but e. g. UUU would could for phenylalanine in most organisms; UUU is the mRNA variant of course, in dsDNA it would be TTT). Also, there is little to no "planning" when horizontal gene transfer happens, whereas porting requires thinking by a human. I don't feel that analogy works well at all.