Agreed, those examples don't really show the up-sides of COBOL. It's optimized for financial and business data processing, mainly on either the "back end" or as

Agreed, those examples don't really show the up-sides of COBOL. It's optimized for financial and business data processing, mainly on either the "back end" or as batch jobs (such as nightly re-processing of the day's transactions). It has a lot of nice short-cuts and built-in "libraries" for that domain. You can get similar libraries/API's for say Java, but they'd be inconsistent for each shop because they are not built into Java. COBOL guarantees that a consistent set of business-oriented operations will be available, reducing the cross-shop learning curve and errors because they are time-tested. Both FORTRAN and COBOL survive by NOT trying to be general-purpose languages, instead making sure they serve their domain well and consistently. I'm afraid some languages such as C# try too hard to be everything to everybody: a systems language, an application language, a scientific language, etc.