As a long time COBOL enthusiast, I must agree that COBOL is alive and well.
I am overseeing a project now to totally rewrite a1.5 million line
powerhouse/cobol monstrosity as cobol and turbo image.  I won out over all
the langauge of the week weenies, and we are building a fast, supportable
system that is about 1/10th the original size because it is well written
COBOL.  You can write junk in any language (even VB), but COBOL lends
itself so well to business, unlike C.

I figured out years ago that UNIX and C got popular because they were so
hard to use.  That is there were so many books, magazines, speakers,
training classes going around that you got an enormous amount of press, and
it was only because they were difficult to use.  COBOL had been around
forever, wasn't hard to pick up, and was established, so you never heard
about it.

I code in other languages too, but for business, COBOL can't be beat.  Be
sure to check out my web site at www.smga3000.com and you can get access to
the first 50 or so COBOL programming tips columns that I wrote.

shawn