The "ancient" COBOL code is no longer a nightmare. IBM uses AI to translate the corresponding code into Java language.
CTOnews.com, August 23, COBOL is an ancient computer programming language, dating back to 1959, but there are still many large enterprises or government agencies using the old software written by COBOL. CTOnews.com reported earlier that at one point, the US government even "officially" recruited programmers who "understand COBOL". According to a 2022 survey, more than 8000 billion lines of COBOL were used in production systems. It is estimated to be 2200 billion rows in 2017.
For the large enterprises and related departments that apply COBOL, due to the small number of COBOL programmers in the world, the migration cost is extremely high. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced that it would retire COBOL in 2012, but it eventually took five years and the total cost was more than A $700 million (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 3.283 billion yuan).
In order to provide a new solution to the modernization of COBOL applications, IBM recently released a service called "IBM Z", which is mainly composed of hardware and AI programming tools. IBM plans to use AI to translate COBOL code into Java. The series of service software and hardware suites will be available in the fourth quarter of 2023 and will be demonstrated at the IBM TechXchange conference in Las Vegas in early September this year.
Ruchir Puri, chief scientist of ▲ image source IBMIBM Research, said that "IBM Z" is designed to help companies restructure their mainframe applications and maintain the performance and security of the corresponding code at the same time. The service includes AI tools that can be run locally or in the cloud as managed services, supported by the code generation model CodeNet, which understands not only COBOL and Java, but also about 80 different programming languages.
▲ source IBM it is reported that the CodeNet model behind "IBM Z" uses 1.5 trillion parameters for training, has 20 billion parameters, and designs a large context window-- 32000 parameters-- to "capture a wider context" to achieve "more efficient COBOL-to-Java conversion".
Puri said that the IBM Z code assistant built by IBM can "mix and match" COBOL and Java services. If the tool suggests that a subservice in the mainframe application is currently and appropriate to use Java refactoring, the relevant module is automatically skipped and the other subservices are converted to Java.
