What is COBOL and was bill gates hired to do with this?

Bill Gates had no direct involvement with COBOL's development; he was 4 years old when COBOL was first released (1959). It's chief designer was Admiral Grace Hopper. COBOL is an acronym for Common Business Oriented Language. It is a verbose language that was initially procedural but is now object-oriented. It's verbosity leads to self-documenting code but programs are huge compared to more structured languages.