I think a very big difference between Cobol and Java/.NET is that it is being used in far more places (mobile,desktop,enterprise) and that the runtime is open f

I think a very big difference between Cobol and Java/.NET is that it is being used in far more places (mobile,desktop,enterprise) and that the runtime is open for other languages (F#,Scala,Python, Ruby etc) because of this the main languages are constantly evolving as well and lots of libs and platforms are written in the main languages, maybe something like Scala will replace Java or Java will become more like Scala but I guess it would not be so easy to replace the the JVM or .NET as it is to replace a (almost) single domain language