Cobol is important

The reason I always bring up Cobol is because whatever theory on language usage, features, and expressiveness that I evaluate must explain why people use COBOL.

I have lots of reasons why people might use it but none of them are satisfactory to me.

I think McCarthy, Backus and Hopper were on to something. I think Wirth and Dijkstra had good criticism for what they created and some new ideas. But I think Ritchie, Bentley and Thompson showed those ideas have practical problems.

I know I used an OS builder and non-language designer at the end. Thompson’s use of C in Unix is important. Bentley because he demonstrated problems with Pascal for expressiveness and two of his students went on to create important langauges, TCL & Java.