Can IBM’s Watson translate the world’s 60-year-old Cobol code?

2023-12-18 09:30:00

“Every day, a 64-year-old programming language that almost no one knows now handles $3 trillion worth of transactions,” he says. escribe PC Magazine. But most schools no longer teach the COBOL programming language, and “COBOL jeans“The workforce is aging and replacements are scarce.

“This is precisely the kind of problem that IBM believes it can solve with AI.” IBM’s approach is quite simple: instead of relying exclusively on a limited group of human programmers to solve the problem, it created an AI-powered generative code assistant Once the partnership is established between man and machine, the AI ​​steps in and says, “Okay, I want to transform this part of the code.” The developer may still need to make some minor edits to the code provided by the AI, Loomis explains. “It may be 80 or 90 percent of what they need, but it still requires a couple of changes. It’s a productivity improvement, not a type of activity that replaces developers.”

But of course, in practice it’s not that simple… After IBM and the client have a deep understanding of the application landscape, data flow and existing dependencies, “we help them refactor their applications,” says Keri Olson, vice president of product management and IT automation at IBM. “That is, breaking it down into smaller parts, which the customer can selectively choose, at that time, to perform the modernization from COBOL to Java.” Skyla Loomis, vice president of IBM Z Software, adds: “But you have to remember that this is a developer support tool.” It is assisted by AI, but still requires the developer. So yes, the developer participates in the tools and helps customers select services.” (watsonx) which helps convert all that dusty old COBOL code to a more modern language, thus saving coders countless hours of reprogramming. In extremely simplified terms, the process is similar to entering an essay written in English into ChatGPT and asking it to translate certain paragraphs into Esperanto. It allows programmers to take a piece of COBOL and hire Watsonx to transform it into Java.

The article quotes a skeptical Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, who notes that IBM “has no case studies, at this time, to validate its claims.”