I think you're being harsh on COBOL. Clearly, it is a thriving language that's being kept up-to-date according to the latest trends. Check the out the COBOL Ruby on Rails equivalent, COBOL ON COGS if you don't believe me: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
I've never really understood why verbosity was that big a deal. I could very easily type the code that I write per month in a single day. A bit of extra time typing for a more verbose language has very little effect on my output. I don't know if that's an artifact of the type of code I write (quite algorithmic, so large periods of sitting and thinking followed by a bit of writing), but it's just never seemed much of an issue to me on a practical level.
You're right of course that typing speed is largely irrelevant... But there's quite a bit more to managing a large code base than how fast you can type. ;)
I'm in favor of expressiveness. I'm against terseness.
Why in heck are we all still programming in GD text? Why not program in some sort of hypertext? IDEs have become so automagical and serious text editors so often have features like code folding, we're a good deal of the way there anyhow! Why not have a suitable hypertext format paired with a language, such that it's straightforward to do things like toggle between viewing the code with and without type annotations? Then we could have languages/environments that feel like Ruby/Python but which have all of the type annotations if you want them. (And they are useful for maintenance programming.)
