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.

As far as I understand, the issue with Cobol specifically is that the code is riddled with gotos and global variables - and untangling all that mess is the real issue, not converting into Java itself.

Using traditional algorithms you end up with literal exponential complexity very fast. You also need a human's ability to figure out which new abstractions to create - otherwise you will end up with a code that is just as difficult to maintain as the original.