First of all COBOL has traditionally been used as a procedural language with structured methodologies. The use of true modularity in COBOL was inhibited because top down structured programming was replaced with functional programming languages like PL/I and C Languages before true modular programming methodologies could be taught and practiced by many COBOL programmers. C and Pascal became the darlings of the academics because there were no true functional modularity constructs in the ANSI COBOL standards at the time. Those came later.

With the advent of SmallTalk and Object Oriented Programming there was resistance until C++ began supporting it. C++ still supported functional programming but added objects, classes, methods, and inheritance for OOP. C++ became so complex that the JAVA Language was created to simplify the learning curve and provide stability by relieving the dependency on pointers. Microsoft had to compete because Visual Studio was a cash cow so it developed C# to compete with JAVA.

Of course the Internet required the development of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). However, this language was too complex for the general programming community which relied on structured programming languages. So the HyperText Markup Language was developed and the HyperText Transmission Protocol (HTTP) was created to facilitate the expansion of the World Wide Web. This spawned the wild growth of HTML and of course chaos. Then came Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to provide some structure to HTML. It was decided a more robust Markup Language was required so Extensible Markup Language (XML) was created. However procedural coding structure was still required for true Web Applications so CGI scripting languages started evolving. Common CGI languages were soon overshadowed by JavaScript, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, et al.

In the meantime XML was deemed too complex so XHTML was created. This caused a branch on the HTML tree between HTML4 and XHTML 1.0 with CSS2.x releases. The browser providers screamed for some sort of standard to follow. So XHTML was dropped and W3C standardized on HTML5 and CSS3. JavaScript and PHP became more popular and Python and Ruby developers grew trying to simplify the bloating of the JAVA specification.

The JAVA Virtual Machines became performance problems because of specification bloat and memory management problems with garbage collection processing and heap mismanagement.

C++ was a better performer than JAVA but harder to master because of the size and number of C libraries and foundations.

C++ and JAVA were in head to head competition to provide multi-platform independent code for Web Application Development.

W3C did such a good job with the HTML5 and CSS3 specifications they have effectively made Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight obsolete.

My recommendation is if you want to build on your COBOL CICS background and want to remain a candidate for COBOL shops then invest in learning JAVA. If you don’t have relational database DML skills then learn SQL. Many experts are betting on XML but my bet is HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are going to trump XML. Right now HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript run on the client side. However a new runtime environment called node.js is becoming popular to run JavaScript on the server-side. This could make JavaScript more popular to run on the server-side than JAVA in the future. What ever you do, learn JAVA Database Connectivity (JDBC). It will be important.

You might want to pick up a primer or learning publication on PHP or Python. PHP seems to be very popular on the Web at this time.

Finally, looking ahead. Start becoming familiar with NoSQL databases such as Hadoop/HBase, Cassandra, CouchDB, MangoDB, DynamoDB, et al. They may be major players as the Cloud Computing craze takes off.