history - (For what) Are Fortran, Cobol and Co. used today? - Stack Overflow

Fortran is still used pretty often in scientific circles or on supercomputers for heavy numerical processing. Recently I was at the Max Planck institute for plasma physics near here and they do a pretty large part of their simulations in Fortran. Besides, the language standards themselves are still in pretty active development, the latest efforts dating back to 2003 and 2008 (with Fortran 2008 being approved since September 2010 – thanks Camilo).

Since Fortran has been in use for more than fifty years, there is a vast body of Fortran in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities. It is the primary language for some of the most intensive supercomputing tasks, such as weather and climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, computational economics, plant breeding and computational physics. Even today, half a century later, many of the floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors are still written in Fortran (e.g., CFP2006, the floating-point component of the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks).—Wikipedia: Fortran, Legacy

COBOL is pretty much alive in many banking and finance systems. Basically you got code there that runs for a few decades now. And there's still the golden rule: If it works, don't touch it. And no need to break it by re-writing everything (and those systems aren't exactly small and can be rewritten in a few days). The latest COBOL standard dates back to 2002 so it's not much older than the current Java version :-).

COBOL programs are in use globally in governmental and military agencies, in commercial enterprises, and on operating systems such as IBM's z/OS, Microsoft's Windows, and the POSIX families (Unix/Linux etc.). In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80 % of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually. —Wikipedia: COBOL, Legacy

Though agreed, most people having to do with programming or computer science rarely come near those languages. But they live a pretty healthy life and are nowhere near dead. That fact probably still remains a decade from now, I think. But there probably aren't many new systems developed in COBOL nowadays, even though Fortran is still used actively for new development.