@MistyMVD I’ve been thinking about why FORTRAN has been continuous used by engineers for 60 years, while COBOL has become niche, and I have a theory.

Engineering problems, as different as they are, mostly deal with math and physics, which are common and non-proprietary.

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Common libraries like BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms), & FFTPACK (Fast Fourier Transforms) have been developed, ported, honed, and used for years. It is a whole ecosystem that is shared, and engineers grow up in this environment, perpetuating the use of FORTRAN.

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COBOL is used mostly for business stuff, and there is a lot less sharing. Each company’s business processes have their own quirks, many of which are proprietary, so you do not have the kind of sharing that FORTRAN does, so the work cost of moving to a new language is a lot less.

And COBOL is used mostly on the mainframe. Why? Because it started on mainframes. The people using minicomputers and then PCs did not come from the business side, and grew up with things like C, rather than COBOL.

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So when people moved off of the mainframe, they got coders who did not know COBOL.