Invented in 1957 by John McCarthy, FLOW-MATIC was the first language designed for business data processing. It was also the first English-like programming language, as opposed to machine code or assembly language. FLOW-MATIC was an early example of a structured programming language, as it included features such as subroutines and goto-less programming.
However, FLOW-MATIC was not widely adopted, due in part to its limited expressiveness. In 1964, IBM released a new version of the language, called COMTRAN, which was more successful. COMTRAN was the basis for the COBOL programming language, which is still in use today.
FLOW-MATIC was influential in the development of other programming languages, including FORTRAN and ALGOL. It is also the ancestor of the FLUPL language, which was created by McCarthy himself in 2006.