Tower of Babel - The Computer Boys Take Over - page 101

apparently had little interest in the academic or scientifi c aspects of their
work. All of the articles included in a May 1962 Communications of the
ACM issue devoted to COBOL were written by industry or government
practitioners. Only four of the thirteen included even the most basic
references to previous and related work; the lack of academic sensibilities
was immediately apparent. Also noticeably lacking was any reference to
the recently developed Backus-Naur Form notation that had already
become popular as a metalanguage for describing other programming
languages. No attempt was made to produce a textbook explaining the
conceptual foundations of COBOL until 1963. Most signifi cant, however,
was the sense that the problem domain addressed by the COBOL design-
ers—that is, business data processing—was not theoretically sophisti-
cated or interesting. One programming language textbook from 1974
portrayed COBOL as having “an orientation toward business data pro-
cessing . . . in which the problems are . . . relatively simple algorithms
coupled with high-volume input-output (e.g., computing the payroll for
a large organization).” Although this dismissive account hardly captures
the complexities of many large-scale business applications, it does appear
to accurately represent a prevailing attitude among computer scientists.
COBOL was considered a “trade-school” language rather than a serious
intellectual accomplishment. 43
Despite these objections, COBOL has proven remarkably successful.
Certainly the support of the U.S. government had a great deal to do with
its initial widespread adoption. But COBOL was attractive to users—
business corporations in particular—for other reasons as well. The belief
that Englishlike COBOL code could be read and understood by nonpro-
grammers was appealing to traditional managers who were worried
about the dangers of “letting the 'computer boys' take over.” 44 It was
also hoped that COBOL would achieve true machine independence—
arguably the holy grail of language designers—and of all its competitors,
COBOL did perhaps come closest to achieving this ideal. Although critics
have derided COBOL as the inelegant result of “design by committee,”
the broad inclusiveness of CODASYL helped ensure that no one manu-
facturer's hardware would be favored. Committee control over the lan-
guage specifi cation also prevented splintering: whereas numerous
competing dialects of FORTRAN and ALGOL were developed, COBOL
implementations remained relatively homogeneous. The CODASYL
structure also provided a mechanism for ongoing language maintenance
with periodic “offi cial” updates and releases.