I had to laugh at this white paper on COBOL: http://www.thinkphp.de/XUL_Study_en.pdf

My favorite quote: "Cobol is still the most important program language in many areas of application development. The Gartner Group estimates a worldwide volume of 180 billion lines of Cobol code. Even in 2005, about 15 percent of all new applications, corresponding to about 5 billion lines of code, will be written in this stone-age language."

I think they are way off on judginging COBOL's success by using lines of code considering it takes about 180 billion lines of COBOL code to write 1 program. Can you really judge a programming language's success by how many lines of code it has in production?

I do think however, that a lot of people programming in the newer languages are pretty ignorant to how valuable a skill it is to be able to write both COBOL code and .NET or Java code.