She had the idea that programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages (such as assembly language) close to machine code, which is how it was normally done at that time. She led the work of COBOL language, which was based very much on her philosophy. It was successful since it was not copyrighted, so many programmers could use it. The spread of COBOL led to it becoming the universal language for business coding. It became used in government, industry, and commerce.