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#.
The point is that there is a lot of COBOL already out there, so someone has to maintained it and add to it. What is more, C# is not a perfect language for business its self, neither is Ruby. With good tooling the difference are small. Actually, in my case I would never recommend using Ruby for a commercial project - but that is another discussion for another time :)
There's been a lot of ruby code written on commercial projects, I think the developers (and customers) would disagree with that.
I also think you're way off on the amount of difference between C# and COBOL. The fact that COBOL requires good tooling to be usable is telling in and of itself.
Believe it or not, just last night I was wishing I could use COBOL instead of C for a project. For simple read/process/write of fixed size binary records, COBOL is a dream to work with. You'd be surprised, there's still some awesome optimizing compilers being written for COBOL.
Billions of lines of COBOL will 10s or even 100s of millions of lines written every year. Each time someone makes a mobile phone call, uses a credit card, books an airline ticket - 99% chance COBOL will handle part of that transaction.
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