Which programming language was specifically designed for business applications?

COBOL, which stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, was specifically designed to meet the needs of business applications. Its development in the late 1950s was driven by a collaboration of various stakeholders in the business and government sectors who needed a programming language that could handle large amounts of data processing and facilitate data interchange among organizations. COBOL's syntax is similar to English, which makes it more accessible for users who may not have extensive programming background, thereby enabling business professionals to understand the code better and participate in software development.

In contrast, FORTRAN was primarily designed for scientific and engineering calculations, focusing on numeric and computational tasks rather than business processes. PASCAL was created as a teaching language and intended more for structured programming and education, although it has been used in some business applications. JAVA, while versatile and widely used in various domains including web and mobile applications, was not specifically designed for business applications like COBOL. Rather, it serves a broader spectrum of programming needs.