COBOL was ESP before ESP was a thing. It was a follow-on from Grace Hopper (she of “bug” fame) and her FLOW-MATIC designs.
It was designed for database queries but more importantly for generating reports from those queries, and since it was being developed to DOD specs, it was designed to be systems portable (machine-independent) as much as possible in an era when most software was still coded for very specific hardware only.
When COBOL was created, most programming was still done in assembler / machine code. C did not exist. FORTRAN was brand new and really still very much in its early stages of development, and it was targeted for scientists and engineers instead of businesses and accounting/databases. ALGOL was being developed as well, especially in Europe.
COBOL (along with ALGOL, mainly) laid some of the foundation for PL/1, and from there ultimately followed C and Pascal. However, COBOL was pretty much dumped on by most of the CS/EE crowd, including the ACM, and pretty much shunned because it was perceived as being more of a “soft” language that was deemed not as useful for things like scientific research and mathematical/engineering calculations.
By the time I entered my CS degree program (1996) COBOL was long gone from the classes, almost all coding lessons were done in Pascal, FORTRAN 90, or K&R C. (C++ was still fairly young and pretty reviled by C coders as being too fluffy.)
At my current job, we interact every day (telnet) with IBM s/360 VM’s running a legacy app built entirely in CICS, and the main system we use runs on Reality DB VM’s (ultimately derived from Pick DB) which use VM implementations of DEC UNIX aka Ultrix but which run on HP and IBM iron (well, blades…)
I didn’t make coding a career so my coding knowledge ended with C and TCL. So I am constantly amazed at the modern languages and how they have shaped modern computing and modern gaming too.