Cobol (Common Business Oriented Language) is one of the oldest programming languages that first appeared in 1959. According to The study published in 2022, today more than 800 billion lines of code on Cobol are used in production systems, while in 2017 this number was about 220 billion.
IBM has introduced a new solution for the modern problem of updating applications on COBOL called Code Assistant for IBM Z system. This solution utilizes artificial intelligence to automatically translate code from Cobol to Java. Ruchir Puri, the chief researcher of IBM Research, made this announcement.
According to Puri, the Code Assistant system was developed to assist enterprises in refactoring their main applications while maintaining performance and security. The platform will be available for public use in the fourth quarter of 2023, and a preview version will be launched at the IBM TechXCHANGE conference in Las Vegas in early September.
Code Assistant is powered by Codenet, a model with 20 billion parameters trained on 1.5 trillion tokens. It is capable of understanding not