alt Hacker NewsCOBOL is endangered, even for banks and airlines. Just look at the executives who see decide to open new digital banks - they're not building on top of COBOL or mainframes. The old banks will be outmaneuvered by the new ones, and eventually succeed them in the market.
The story of languages like COBOL isn't that a language is too deeply embedded to become too expensive to replace. It just means the replacement will happen at a higher level - the business itself, and will take more time as a result.
A single cobol mainframe application is not a problem for a bank. Big banks are usually made by buying up dozens of other banks so they might have very many of these mainframes running and interoperating. That is where the real insanity lies