Can IBM's Watson Translate the World's 60-Year-Old Cobol Code?

'Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore,' writes PC Magazine. But most school's don't teach the mainframe programming language COBOL any more, and 'COBOL cowboys' are aging out of the workforce, with replacements in short supply.

'This is precisely the kind of problem that IBM thinks it can fix with AI.'

IBM's approach is fairly straightforward: Rather than relying exclusively on a limited pool of human programmers to solve the problem, it built a generative AI-powered code assistant (watsonx) that helps convert all that dusty old COBOL code to a more modern language, thereby saving coders countless hours of reprogramming. In extremely simplified terms, the process is similar to feeding an essay written in English into ChatGPT and asking it to translate certain paragraphs into Esperanto. It allows programmers to take a chunk of COBOL and enlist watsonx to transform it into Java.

But of course, it's not quite that simple in practice... After IBM and the customer have a thorough understanding of the application landscape, the data flow, and the existing dependencies, 'we help them refactor their applications,' says IBM's Vice President of Product Management, IT Automation, Keri Olson. 'That is, breaking it down into smaller pieces, which the customer can selectively choose, at that point, to do the modernization from COBOL to Java.' Skyla Loomis, IBM's Vice President of IBM Z Software adds, 'But you have to remember that this is a developer assistant tool. It's AI assisted, but it still requires the developer. So yes, the developer is involved with the tooling and helping the customers select the services.'

Once the partnership between man and machine is established, the AI steps in and says, 'Okay, I want to transform this portion of code. The developer may still need to perform some minor editing of the code that the AI provides, Loomis explains. 'It might be 80 or 90 percent of what they need, but it still requires a couple of changes. It's a productivity enhancement — not a developer replacement type of activity.'

The article quotes a skeptical Gartner Distinguished Vice President and Analyst, who notes that IBM 'has no case studies, at this time, to validate its claims.'

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