The COBOL community has always been isolated from the computer science community. No academic computer scientists participated in the design of COBOL: all of those on the committee came from commerce or government. Computer scientists at the time were more interested in fields like numerical analysis, physics and system programming than the commercial file-processing problems which COBOL development tackled. Jean Sammet attributed COBOL's unpopularity to an initial "snob reaction" due to its inelegance, the lack of influential computer scientists participating in the design process and a disdain for business data processing. The COBOL specification used a unique "notation", or metalanguage, to define its syntax rather than the new Backus–Naur form which the committee did not know of. This resulted in "severe" criticism.