From my 10 years in consulting, I have to say that Mainframe programmers still using COBOL/Fortran/PL/1 or whatever -- just haven't seen the light. Kids are learning PERL, XML, HTML and Javascript in high school. And... can do more with it that any 15 year vet in COBOL/CICS/JCL. COBOL exceled in batch/file processing for non-academics: ie, those people who needed code to say "MOVE WS-MY-BIG-NUMBER TO WS-MY-BIG-TOTAL" instead of a=b.