Steve:

As an ex-COBOL analyst and IBM360 JCL writer, I appreciate your final comments in the article. It has been said many, many times that COBOL is old hat and will die....Long live COBOL....even tho I've cut the cord and gone with SQL, VB.Net and many other client server applications and tools in my current labors.

While it is great to be able to use or try new products, there are times when the "cost" of learning a new technology is many times more expensive than doing the same task with aged processes or languages. When was the last time anyone wrote a DOS batch file? For me, about two months ago to handle a remote process on another server. Some technologies will never die.