No, COBOL Is Not a Dead Language While there may not have been enough COBOL programmers to fix New Jersey's unemployment system, the language still runs the world's economy. In April 2020, when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced that the state desperately needed volunteers with COBOL skills, the announcement raised a lot of eyebrows. The state's unemployment insurance system got overwhelmed by a surge of COVID-19-related unemployment claims, creating a backlog in processing cases. It ran 40-year-old COBOL applications, and there weren't enough people familiar with what most assumed was an antiquated programming language. The fact that the system was running apps written in COBOL eclipsed the late unemployment payments in news accounts. IT workers saw it as yet another sign of America's deteriorating infrastructure. To people unfamiliar with the ins and outs of mainframe computing, COBOL was something from the age of the dinosaurs.