An acquaintance was surprised to learn recently that the COBOL business programming language, created ~ 1959, was still in use in 2019.

In fact COBOL is still prolific and won't be going away any time soon, if ever.

Below are several observations which demonstrate that COBOL is still alive and well today.

✔️ Companies are still actively hiring COBOL developers [1]. LinkedIn, for example, has 2075 COBOL jobs open in the US today.
✔️ The national average for a senior COBOL developer is ~ $110k [2].
✔️ COBOL has been object oriented since 2002 [3].
✔️ GitHub has 1558 COBOL repositories [4].
✔️ The LinkedIn Mainframe Experts Network has ~ 32k members [5a].
✔️ The LinkedIn Mainframe Experts Group, which includes COBOL, has ~ 47.6k members [5b].
✔️ There are 173 groups in total on LinkedIn which include COBOL.
✔️ Micro Focus offers JVM COBOL support [6].
✔️ The Oracle GraalVM supports COBOL [7].
✔️ The Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 IDE supports COBOL [8].
✔️ COBOL code can be run on AWS Lambda [9].
✔️ Per [10 & 11] 25k+ companies use COBOL.
✔️ In 2017 Reuters calculated that there was still 220bn lines of COBOL code running in production & COBOL systems handled $3 trillion in commerce every day [12].

If you have additional points please add your thoughts in the comments section.

References

[1] https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2018/11/3-aging-it-specialties-just-won-t-retire
[2] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Senior-Cobol-Developer-Salary
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL
[4] https://github.com/search?q=cobol
[5a] https://www.linkedin.com/groups/55779/
[5b] https://www.linkedin.com/groups/910927/
[6] https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/visual-cobol/VC40/EclWin/GUID-DEAFFCA6-6D75-4AEA-A3B6-6DF0BDCF3E2F.html
[7] https://www.graalvm.org/uploads/graalvm-language-level-virtualization-oracle-tech-papers.pdf
[8] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2015/09/09/visual-studio-2015-now-supports-cobol-and-you-can-make-desktop-and-web-apps-with-it/
[9] https://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/252454023/COBOL-applications-can-go-serverless-on-AWS-Lambda
[10] "Companies using COBOL"
[12] https://thenewstack.io/cobol-everywhere-will-maintain/