What happens when a programming language becomes obsolete?

Question

Are languages like COBOL and FORTRAN considered obsolete? what happens when a language becomes too old to be of any practical use? are programs that are built with these languages completely rewritten in another newer language like C# or Python? I'm curious!

Answer 1

Probably a lot of programs are also just thrown away. The reason is actually more that the hardware on which the software is running is not available anymore.

If you think about how programs worked 30 years ago then throwing them away is a quite good option. A lot of times there are already much more advanced options available.

Once I had to replace 5 control panels from 1970, because they couldn't move them without breaking them. I didn't even bother to look at the code. I just looked at the functionality and wrote the program from scratch...

Answer 2

I found this from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Isolation_from_the_computer_science_community

A 2013 poll by Micro Focus found that 20% of university academics thought COBOL was outdated or dead and that 55% believed their students thought COBOL was outdated or dead. The same poll also found that only 25% of academics had COBOL programming on their curriculum even though 60% thought they should teach it.[166] In contrast, in 2003, COBOL featured in 80% of information systems curricula in the United States, the same proportion as C++ and Java.[167]