SAP ABAP is an object-oriented programming language that SAP developed in 1983 for use within SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. It helps companies manage many, if not all, aspects of their business operations. To understand SAP ABAP, you need to understand SAP first. SAP is a platform that companies use to manage their internal resources, but there may be times that the company needs to modify the code of its platform. To do so, they would use a language called "SAP ABAP." When they want to customize their platform, they get an SAP ABAP developer to program code — which can be thought of as a language that computers use — to tell the program what to do. A common reason a developer might need to use SAP ABAP is that a company wants to integrate its SAP program with another computer program. The developer would use the SAP ABAP programming language to "tell" the SAP program how to speak with the other computer program.