There's even a COBOL frontend in GCC these days! That being said, the problem isn't so much the COBOL language itself but rather that all the software written

There's even a COBOL frontend in GCC these days! That being said, the problem isn't so much the COBOL language itself but rather that all the software written in it is connected to all kinds of database system, messaging systems(?) and whatnot, making it very hard to move to some non-mainframe platform even if a customer so chooses. Or to put it another way, it's cheaper to pay even the very high prices to IBM to keep on the mainframe track rather than to migrate.