Because COBOL is alive and well. It's not interesting, but it's far from dead. A friend of mine works on a COBOL system that's responsible for calculating pen

Because COBOL is alive and well. It's not interesting, but it's far from dead. A friend of mine works on a COBOL system that's responsible for calculating pension payments for former government employees. COBOL is good enough for this application, since it's basically just a glorified pile of if-statements. Rewriting everything in the hot-new-language-of-the-year would almost certainly introduce bugs, so instead of screwing up people's pension checks every couple of years, they just pay a my friend to know COBOL and to keep the rules up to date. There's still enough of a community behind COBOL that there's really no reason not to do this. COBOL compilers continue to be maintained, and even the language itself is getting updated (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_2014).