Tower of Babel - The Computer Boys Take Over - page 100

were loath to abandon their own independent business languages.
Honeywell's FACT had been widely praised for its technical excellence,
and the IBM Commercial Translator already had an established cus-
tomer base. 38 By the end of 1960, however, the U.S. military had put the
full weight of its prestige and purchasing power behind COBOL. The
Department of Defense announced that it would not lease or purchase
any new computer without a COBOL compiler unless its manufacturer
could demonstrate that its performance would not be enhanced by the
availability of COBOL. 39 No manufacturer ever attempted such a dem-
onstration, and within a year COBOL was well on its way toward
becoming an industry standard.
It is diffi cult to establish empirically how widely COBOL was adopted,
but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is by far the most popular and
widely used computer language ever . 40 A recent study undertaken
in response to the perceived Y2K crisis suggests that there are
seventy billion lines of COBOL code currently in operation in the
United States alone. Despite its obvious popularity, though, from the
beginning COBOL has faced severe criticism and opposition, especially
from within the computer science community. One programming lan-
guage textbook from 1977 judged COBOL's programming features as
fair, its implementation dependent features as poor, and its overall
writing as fair to poor. It also noted its “tortuously poor compactness
and poor uniformity.” 41 The noted computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra
wrote that “COBOL cripples the mind,” and another of his colleagues
called it “terrible” and “ugly.” 42 Several notable textbooks on program-
ming languages from the 1980s did not even include COBOL in the
index.
There are a number of reasons why computer scientists have been so
harsh in their evaluation of COBOL. Some of these objections are techni-
cal in nature, but most are aesthetic, historical, or political. Most of the
technical criticisms have to do with COBOL's verbosity, its inclusion of
superfl uous noise words, and its lack of certain features (such as pro-
tected module variables). Although many of these shortcomings were
addressed in subsequent versions of the COBOL specifi cation, the aca-
demic world continued to vilify the language. In an article from 1985
titled “The Relationship between COBOL and Computer Science,” the
computer scientist Ben Schneiderman identifi ed several explanations
for this continued hostility. First of all, no academics were asked to
participate on the initial design team. In fact, the COBOL developers