Also known as: Cobol
COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language), introduced in 1959, is a deliberately English-like high-level language built for business data processing.1 Shaped by the work of Grace Hopper and a committee, it still runs huge amounts of banking and government software today.
History
COBOL used English-like syntax on purpose, so business processes would be readable by non-specialists, not just programmers. A compiler translates those verbose, statement-style programs into machine code. It was standardised by a committee under pressure from the U.S. government to create a common business language, and Grace Hopper’s earlier work on English-like programming heavily influenced its design. It became, alongside FORTRAN for science and LISP for AI, one of the defining languages of the first era of high-level programming.
Legacy and use today
COBOL is statically typed, imperative, and compiled to native code without a garbage collector.2 Astonishingly, vast amounts of banking, insurance, and government software still run on it, processing daily transactions on mainframes. That is also its core problem: the code is decades old, the pool of programmers who know it is shrinking, and its verbosity and age make it a poor fit for new work, which has largely moved to languages like Java and C. Its endurance is a reminder that working software rarely gets rewritten just because it is old.