In what way is it terrible?

No you don’t? What are you basing this claim off?

When it comes to COBOL developers, there are a lot of developers retiring but there are also a lot of programmers being trained in COBOL every year. It’s for this reason that the average age of COBOL developers has stayed roughly the same for the past 2 decades despite retirements.

But that said the total number of COBOL developers is decreasing overall, which is an issue.

Not many young programmers want to learn COBOL. COBOL isn’t taught in many educational institutions. There are very few online resources that programmers can use to self-teach COBOL.

It’s a shame. COBOL is great for it’s specific use case but it isn’t very “accessible” in that regard when compared to other languages.

I’m a COBOL developer. For old COBOL systems it’s not just a case of it being expensive to “migrate away”, it’s extremely risky and for no significant benefit.

Businesses have essentially two options, modernize what they already have, or tear everything apart and start from scratch. COBOL programs don’t “just work”, they’re good at what they need to do (business transactions). Therefore, there isn’t a significant need to rewrite everything, especially when it’s possible to modernize and reuse existing business logic contained within COBOL programs. For example, COBOL programs aren’t tied to old hardware, you can run your COBOL applications on the cloud instead. This is much safer and cheaper than rewriting everything.