Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in Production.

But then all of this has been known for decades. There are plenty of well-known techniques for how to do all that. If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.

Not hard. It's a bit old-fashioned and sort of verbose but it's nothing difficult especially if you already know any other imperative languages. My first job out of school in the early 1990s was with one of the "big" consulting firms. We learned COBOL in a four-week boot camp and were then dispatched to a client site to write code.