Some people like IDE's; some don't. I've found them a mixed blessing for a number of reasons, most of which are entirely subjective. Two problems I've seen fairly often are that IDE's tend to encourage many programmers – especially inexperienced ones – tend to jump into coding too soon and that IDE's seem to encourage developers to think in terms of widgets, not in terms of data and algorithms.

COBOL, a language in which I've done essentially no work, is alive for a number of reasons, including the simple fact that is an excellent language for its problem domain. It also has a large, albeit shrinking, pool of programmers who are both very proficient in the language and very proficient in the problem domain.