COBOL, acronym for "Common Business-Oriented Language, is an older programming language that is still widely used today in financial system applications.

Story

The first specification of the language was developed and presented in 1959 by Grace Hopper, Admiral of the American Navy, at a computer event at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). After this event, the Department of Defense began sponsoring and taking over the project, creating three committees (short, medium and long term) to create an official language specification.
The short term committee created the official COBOL specification in December 1959, inspired by languages ​​like FLOWMATIC, while the medium and long term committees were never used.
In 1960 the first COBOL compilers disappeared. In December 1960 the same COBOL program was run on two different computers, showing compatibility between different versions of the language. In 1968 the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a COBOL specification that resolved some compatibility issues between different versions of COBOL.
In 1991 the COBOL specifications became the responsibility of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which released the specifications.

How still persists?

COBOL is not an extremely powerful language for creating interactive applications or web-oriented products, although it works very well for doing batch operations (like batch scripts and others). Why then simply doesn't language die?
Simple: it is more expensive and risky to create a program from scratch in Java than to maintain a program that already works in COBOL. Often the program's business rules are only described in the program (complete documentation is something recent in computer history), so it is safer to just keep the program running and increment when necessary.