It's often critical, just in a completely different field. The best explanation is simply the names - Common Business-Orientated Language vs Formula Translation.
So the Fortran equivalent of the current situation was NASA being desperate for Fortran programmers to patch Voyager a few years ago (which may have been overblown - my understanding is that they had the programmers, someone just took the "what's the problem?" and ran with it). Orbital models, weather models, stuff that's deep science put into code. COBOL is stuff where business logic is put into code.
They're both titans in their fields to this day - just different fields. At a very, very high level it’s essentially matlab vs excel.
So the Fortran equivalent of the current situation was NASA being desperate for Fortran programmers to patch Voyager a few years ago (which may have been overblown - my understanding is that they had the programmers, someone just took the "what's the problem?" and ran with it). Orbital models, weather models, stuff that's deep science put into code. COBOL is stuff where business logic is put into code.
They're both titans in their fields to this day - just different fields. At a very, very high level it’s essentially matlab vs excel.