I was at a Very Large insurance company last month where they discussed a suite of new Cobol applications they were deploying and what infrastructure they were

I was at a Very Large insurance company last month where they discussed a suite of new Cobol applications they were deploying and what infrastructure they were going to need to deploy them (very large $$$ worth, btw). They could have done it in Java (and do many things in it), but believed that because of their experience and the critical nature of the apps, Cobol was much less risky. As a tangent, they tried at one point to change their development language to Smalltalk (because at the time it was what the cool kids wanted to use), but we don't mention that in their presence. Once your experience in development evolves beyond buzzword-bingo web apps and obsession with faddish language features, you find all sorts of real work being done in uncool things like Cobol, Ada, Fortran, VB, etc.