Why Has COBOL Endured?

Given the rarity of anything in the IT industry surviving for over 40 years , it is appropriate to ask why has COBOL endured for so long. An underlying mission of COBOL language development during its entire lifespan has been to keep COBOL's syntax and new features relevant to modern application development methodologies and to do so with utmost respect for the large number of COBOL applications still running on computers around the world. The ISO COBOL o2002 language is an evolutionary product. Today's COBOL is the result of much determined work by the various COBOL committees that have contributed to its evolution, among them ISO, INCITS, ANSI, CODASYL, ECMA, and the national COBOL committees represented by individual countries (Netherlands, Canada, France, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, et al).