Watsonx: AI tames Cobol

Watsonx. © IBM.

COBOL, a language in use for more than sixty years, is immortal. COBOL developers, on the other hand, are only human, and their numbers are dwindling rapidly. Which is alarming, not least because many large, mission-critical systems around the world still run on COBOL. One solution is to modernize these systems by translating the software into Java, but this is a herculean task. Kyle Charlet, IBM’s CTO for zSystems software, explains:

“Some clients … have spent years and millions trying to modernize their COBOL code, and despite all that, only a fraction has been modernized. It takes lots of developers and painstaking manual work to rewrite COBOL. People have tried many different ways to modernize these applications, and in my experience, with varied results. None are exemplary.”

IBM struck on the idea of using artificial intelligence to speed up the process. Its IBM Watsonx wizard, soon available for Z, analyzes, refactors and validates product code. As Watsonx.ai has reportedly been trained in over 100 coding languages, we can expect that other generative intelligence co-pilots for venerable mainframe code will follow.

⇨ YouTube, “IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z product demonstration”

⇨ Ars Technica, Kevin Purdy, “IBM’s generative AI tool aims to refactor ancient COBOL code for its mainframes.”

2023-08-23