WHY COBOL LOSSED IT'S POPULARITY
COVER PAGE OF COBOL 60 PRGRAMING LANGUAGE Lack of structure In the 1970s, adoption of the structured programming paradigm was becoming increasingly widespread. Edsger Dijkstra, a preeminent computer scientist, wrote a letter to the editor of Communications of the ACM, published 1975 entitled "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", in which he was critical of COBOL and several other contemporary languages; remarking that "the use of COBOL cripples the mind". In a published dissent to Dijkstra's remarks, the computer scientist Howard E. Tompkins claimed that unstructured COBOL tended to be "written by programmers that have never had the benefit of structured COBOL taught well", arguing that the...