The 64-year-old language that no one cares about: 3 trillion dollars in transactions are processed every day, and much of the world uses its code

Compile | Zheng Liyuan

出品 | CSDN（ID：CSDNnews）

There is one programming language that is used by most of the world's business and financial systems, processes $3 trillion worth of transactions every day, and is now mastered by very few developers – COBOL, a 64-year-old programming language.

Born in the 50s of the 20th century, COBOL is a high-level programming language for business applications, and in the decades of rapid development of software development, it has gradually become synonymous with "old" and "old": COBOL was originally intended for business people rather than programmers, and in order to make it easier for businessmen to understand its code logic, its syntax is somewhat, such as no functions or subroutines, but there are concepts of subsections, paragraphs, and statements.

So back in the '70s, Edsger W. Dijkstra, a Turing Award winner and developer of the shortest path algorithm, criticized COBOL and said, "The use of COBOL weakens the mind, and all teaching COBOL programming should be considered a criminal offense!"

Since then, with the advent of many modern programming languages, COBOL has gradually been forgotten by developers, and most schools no longer include it in the scope of teaching, and various core systems such as banks and governments built on COBOL have long been widely used, so it is still one of the most commonly used mainframe programming languages in the world today: according to IJARSCT, 43% of banking systems still use COBOL, processing up to $3 trillion in transactions per day, including 95% of ATM transactions in the United States 80% of credit card transactions.

The data proves that COBOL is not a substitute for its importance, although it is gradually being forgotten.

There is an urgent need for COBOL-proficient programmers

Despite this, few people today are interested in learning Xi COBOL: not only is the coding cumbersome, it reads like English, the coding format is inflexible, and the compilation time is much longer than similar products. Over time, the older generation of programmers who focused on COBOL programming are retiring, and there are fewer and fewer young programmers who can handle and maintain this COBOL code.

So in 2020, this potential hidden danger finally exploded.

At that time, the United States was affected by the epidemic and ushered in a wave of unemployment, causing many people to apply for unemployment benefits. The unemployment insurance system in New Jersey, which has been used for more than 40 years, is written in COBOL, and in the face of the sudden hundreds of thousands of applications, this system in its 40s is obviously a bit "stressful" and urgently needs personnel to rescue and maintain.

That's why the governor of New Jersey is calling for an urgent hire of COBOL-speaking programmers for $55-$85 an hour! But as mentioned above, many of the programmers who are proficient in COBOL are 60+ years old, and few of the new generation of programmers are specialized in COBOL. Unfortunately, New Jersey is not alone – statistically, at least 12 states in the U.S. at the time were using unemployment systems written in COBOL, and they were facing the same situation as New Jersey.

Through this, many people realized that there was a problem: we needed to maintain and modernize the code that underpinned the business and financial worlds, but there weren't enough technical people to do the updates.

With this in mind, IBM believes that AI may be the answer: it has launched an AI programming assistant called "watsonx" that converts COBOL into Java to alleviate the current acute shortage of proficient COBOL programmers.

Converting COBOL to Java with AI?

IBM's solution was simple: instead of relying solely on a limited number of human programmers to solve problems, instead built an AI-powered code generation assistant, watsonx, to convert all the old COBOL code into a more modern language, helping to save programmers countless hours of recoding — if explained in one sentence, similar to throwing an English article to ChatGPT, it will help you translate into Chinese.

Despite the principle, watsonx is not as convenient to use as ChatGPT.

Keri Olson, IBM's vice president of product management for IT automation, explains that watsonx is an end-to-end solution that requires multiple steps to complete complex code translation tasks: "Once IBM and the client have a thorough understanding of the application environment, data flows, and existing dependencies, we help them refactor the application, i.e., break it down into smaller pieces, at which point the customer can selectively convert code from COBOL to Java." ”

In addition, Skyla Loomis, vice president of software at IBM Z, stressed: "You have to remember that watsonx is just an AI-assisted tool that still requires developer involvement, not all of it." ”

It remains to be seen whether AI will be able to successfully convert code

If watsonx does achieve its product goal of helping programmers convert COBOL to Java, it could have a huge impact on the future – however, not everyone believes it is what IBM calls the silver bullet.

Arun Chandrasekara, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner, is skeptical, arguing that IBM doesn't yet have a case study to validate its claims: "Generative AI is an early technology that will take time to perfect. I believe they have checks and balances in place to deal with this, but I'd prefer to take a 'wait and see' approach. ” 

Even IBM itself admits that the technology is an unproven new technology, but remains optimistic about its prospects: "It's true that we're still in the early stages of providing this kind of service to our customers, and we haven't published any case studies yet. But we have experience with Z compute and mainframe customers, as well as experience with AI, and we're combining those two to deliver a state-of-the-art AI experience. ” 

So, while leveraging AI to transform code is a promising idea, it remains to be seen if it can actually be successfully deployed and have a real-world impact. 

However, according to a 2023 Gartner report, "by 2028, the collaboration of humans and AI assistants could reduce the time to complete coding tasks by 30%", and that 80% of programmers will use AI in some way – as AI technology sweeps the world and more companies and developers invest in AI development, the day when AI will be used to convert code seems "just around the corner."

Reference Links:

https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson

https://towardsdatascience.com/forget-about-python-learn-cobol-and-become-a-crisis-hero-7f15e75ff377

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