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Third, the development environments grew capabilities for interactive software development that, again, made the unique PL/I interactive and debugging strengths less valuable. Berg, William; Cline, Marshall; Girou, Mike (October 1995). "Lessons learned from the OS/400 OO project". Communications of the ACM. 38 (10): 54–64. doi: 10.1145/226239.226253. S2CID 7492851. The string attributes VARYINGZ (for zero-terminated character strings), HEXADEC, WIDECHAR, and GRAPHIC. PL/I did not fulfill its supporters' hopes that it would displace Fortran and COBOL and become the major player on mainframes. It remained a minority but significant player. There cannot be a definitive explanation for this, but some trends in the 1970s and 1980s militated against its success by progressively reducing the territory on which PL/I enjoyed a competitive advantage.

Liant Software Corporation (1994), Open PL/I Language Reference Manual, Rev. Ed., Framingham (Mass.).

Though the language is easy to learn and use, implementing a PL/I compiler is difficult and time-consuming. A language as large as PL/I needed subsets that most vendors could produce and most users master. This was not resolved until "ANSI G" was published. The compile time facilities, unique to PL/I, took added implementation effort and additional compiler passes. A PL/I compiler was two to four times as large as comparable Fortran or COBOL compilers, and also that much slower—supposedly offset by gains in programmer productivity. This was anticipated in IBM before the first compilers were written. [9]

Micro Focus implemented Open PL/I for Windows [58] and UNIX/Linux systems, [59] which they acquired from Liant. On the positive side, full support for pointers to all data types (including pointers to structures), recursion, multitasking, string handling, and extensive built-in functions meant PL/I was indeed quite a leap forward compared to the programming languages of its time. However, these were not enough to persuade a majority of programmers or shops to switch to PL/I.

Paul W. Abrahams. The CIMS PL/I compiler. 1979 SIGPLAN symposium on Compiler construction. pp.107–116. doi: 10.1145/800229.806960. ISBN 0-89791-002-8.