NATURAL emerged in the 1970s as a kind of superhero for organizations wanting to build business applications quickly and efficiently. Rather than getting tangled in low-level code, developers could write in a style that closely resembled natural language-hence the name "NATURAL." The language is tightly integrated with the ADABAS database, which made it popular in large enterprise environments.

What’s fun (and a bit retro) about NATURAL is its "almost natural" approach to programming, well before modern low-code/no-code trends took off. It was designed to reduce the amount of code and speed up development cycles-something many teams still seek today, albeit with more modern tools.

Although NATURAL may not top the list for new projects nowadays, it still lives on in many legacy systems that continue to run in the background. It’s a real time capsule from an era when programming was all about getting the job done.