While I think that you are definitely right and that nowadays Cobol would probably not be the first choice for 98% companies out there, I think we should also consider that according to TIOBE ( http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index ) Cobol is one of the 20 most used languages in the world - and it's also thanks to it that we can use banks efficiently. Can we all say goodbye to Cobol? Go and ask those ones who program in such language - who make a s* load of money with it.
I personally could say goodbye to Assembly, as I only used it for learning purposes, I could say goodbye to Perl, because I don't use it and I don't like it, or I could say goodbye to Visual Basic - for other reasons. All these languages are extremely powerful, they still do their job today, although some are too low-level for our everyday applications, some are just in a process of replacement (like Cobol, of course). However, I tend to keep these opinions for myself.
"Saying goodbye" in such cases is a strong statement, inherently sensationalist and biased, therefore my criticism toward the title. In a field like computer science, you can't and shouldn't use such titles. Such a title shows already how biased you (the author) are.
I personally could say goodbye to Assembly, as I only used it for learning purposes, I could say goodbye to Perl, because I don't use it and I don't like it, or I could say goodbye to Visual Basic - for other reasons. All these languages are extremely powerful, they still do their job today, although some are too low-level for our everyday applications, some are just in a process of replacement (like Cobol, of course). However, I tend to keep these opinions for myself.
"Saying goodbye" in such cases is a strong statement, inherently sensationalist and biased, therefore my criticism toward the title. In a field like computer science, you can't and shouldn't use such titles. Such a title shows already how biased you (the author) are.