I would argue that, despite the design failures, more of modern society runs on JavaScript. I know that it is hard to accept, but a crappy piece of ten year old JS with JQuery submitting a basic XHR request to a server to book a seat on an airplane or at a show matters just as much as your insurance operation that squeezes out a fraction of a point of return for an insurance package.

We live in a world where many of the software languages we use really do matter. If all Ruby interpreters disappeared overnight it would cause global havoc. Real panic. Trillions of dollars of damage.

But because we've learned to rely on these languages continued existence we can undervalue any one of them, including COBOL. I don't because I've thought about it and concluded that we're essentially building on things akin to writing or mathematics. Our building blocks are vital, even if they're easy to take for granted.