Full form of COBOL is “Common Business Oriented Language”. Developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, COBOL is the second-oldest high-level programming language (FORTRAN is the oldest). It is particularly popular for business applications that run on large computers. It developed from the 1959 Conference on Data Systems Languages, a joint initiative between the U.S. government and the private sector. Early work in more accessible programming languages came from Grace Hopper, a U.S. Navy officer who pioneered the use of English-language programming instructions in place of machine language. COBOL is still the most widely used programming language in the world.