[danpalmer]

Doesn't look like it's mentioned here, but expense of the COBOL toolchain has got to be an issue for its uptake.

Paid toolchains have essentially failed in software engineering. There are some hybrid business models in game engine toolchains, but moving towards more free/open/flexible systems has resulted in huge growth. You can pay for support from certain companies, but that's not quite the same.

If you want to run COBOL, you typically need to buy a compiler, buy specialist hardware, and buy an IDE. There are open COBOL compilers but COBOL compilers have compatibility issues worse than browsers so particular compilers do matter.

The most modern and accessible COBOL development that I'm aware of is JVM/CLR COBOL developed in Visual Studio/Eclipse. You can even run it on Android! But you have to buy the whole toolchain, and it's very much "call us for pricing", not low prices and putting in a card number.

This ultimately prevents new people from joining the community as open/free compilers and toolchains are essentially table stakes at this point, and that means the community is only going to shrink.