They want to deprecate the COBOL programming language. The fact is that it is almost old enough (it was created in 1959, 64 years ago), but its presence in the computer market is as surprising as it is disturbing, depending on which company: there are not so many professionals who can program anymore. IBM decided to take another route: translate it to Java.

perennial. You youngsters may not have heard of the COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) programming language, but it is one of the oldest and surprisingly most durable languages. A 2022 survey revealed that there are still 800,000 million lines of COBOL code in production environments serving companies of all kinds. Interestingly, this number has increased significantly since 2017, when it was estimated at 220,000 million rows.

a difficult language. The problem, of course, is the weight of years and the inadequacy of language for these times. Companies that continue to use it have made the transition process as best they can – Bank of Australia took 5 years and invested $700 million in one of these processes – but there are projects so huge that it has become impossible to adapt them. Now. For years, the US Department of Defense has been trying to do the same with the MOCAS management system: when it started, even the screen and keyboard were not used, instead punch cards were used.

COBOL to Java. As reported on TechCrunch, IBM company recently announced Code Assistant for IBM Z, a platform that uses a generative artificial intelligence model that can convert COBOL to Java code. It’s expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2023, and it’s claimed to be a promising option when it comes to adapting legacy projects based on this language to new times on hosts where these apps typically run.

CodeNet. This is the name of the code generation model that not only understands COBOL and Java, but also 80 other programming languages, allowing it to be used in other scenario types. According to those responsible for IBM, this system is capable of maintaining both the performance and security of the original application. The model is trained with 1.5 trillion tokens and has 20 billion parameters. It also accepts context windows of up to 32,000 coins, allowing the input of long segments of COBOL code that will be translated later.

The evolution of previous “translators”. IBM Research chief scientist Ruchir Puri explained that although COBOL-to-Java translators are already available, Code Assistant excels at avoiding sacrificing some of the benefits COBOL provides and produces maintainable code that does not exist on the surface. Clear on competitor products. In fact, it has the capacity to deliver a hybrid result that combines Java with legacy COBOL code segments that can still be exploited if found to be useful for the localized platform.

But you should check this code. A recent Stanford study showed that such tools can create vulnerabilities in code; Puri also acknowledges this. Even so, he explains, “it is important that the code is analyzed with state-of-the-art vulnerability scanners to ensure the security of the code.”

A market to exploit. Today, 84% of customers using IBM mainframes run COBOL applications in industries such as finance and government. This division of business is still vital to IBM, but as TechCrunch noted, the company is trying to make it a gateway for its most lucrative division, the hybrid computing environments (including the cloud) division that the company has promoted for years.

Pictures | IBM | Wikimedia

on Xataka | Lost languages: COBOL, Delphi or FORTRAN still critical but no one programmed them