Nathan S. answered • 10/13/21
Mainframe Database Administrator with Mainframe Application Experience
The name COBOL is really short for COmmon Business-Oriented Language and is a programming language that first appeared in the late 1950s with a standard being created in the 1960s. The objective of the COBOL standard was to allow customers that used mainframe computers to more easily port their code from one vendor's mainframe to another. At that time, vendors tended to have proprietary languages that businesses would use for writing their business applications.
COBOL is a very verbose language, and it was hoped that a verbose programming language with many keywords in the syntax would allow business users to have an English-like language for transforming business rules into something the computer would understand. You can see this design language with code blocks being referred to as paragraphs and program statements ending with periods.
COBOL's main domain is on the mainframe. Large businesses, like banks, financial, insurance, logistics, retail, and manufacturing companies, still use the mainframe--also referred to as IBM Z--for critical applications and data processing. COBOL underpins a number of transactions that we rely upon every day.
