Net-new COBOL code is being written every day in the Enterprise world. I work on a team that's actively updating and maintaining a large COBOL codebase. The default standard that most people write to is COBOL-85.

Just because the language is old doesn't mean that it can't be the right tool for the right job. For batch processing-type tasks, there nothing better than COBOL on the mainframe. By default, COBOL doesn't allow for you to dynamically allocate memory. That makes it incredibly easy for the compiler and system to optimize the compiled code and make it run super fast.

COBOL is great for what it was designed for: processing data. If you want to read data from a file/database, process it in some way, and then save that data back to the database/another file, you can't do much better than what COBOL offers.