New IDEs make working in COBOL as easy as C#, VB or Ruby.

That title ("Visual Studio COBOL") reminded me of the less-serious "Cobol on Cogs" site: <a href="http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM" rel="nofollow">http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM</a>

Here's a word i haven't heard in a long time... In those days we chose to learn Clipper over Cobol, each CL would take 2-3 minutes to compile on a 8086 processor. Now it takes less than 1 sec to do it, lol

While this might make the actual process of typing in the code easier, it doesn't make the language any better. I still can't imagine choosing to use COBOL over using Ruby or even C#.

How much COBOL is there still out there?

It would be good if Micro Focus released an Eclipse plugin too.