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

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127 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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nunez ◴[04 Dec 23 02:10 UTC] No.38512959[source]▶
Literally today I was checking out of a rental car center and the checkout person loaded up an emulated green screen mainframe program to complete the process.

I know for sure that Avis's reservation system runs on mainframe.

To me, that means that the business logic of rental car checkout and return is so complicated and/or nuanced, it is cheaper for rental car companies to find/retain mainframe developers to keep these running than it would be to re-platform onto commodity hardware.

Also, given that basically every industry is powered by a handful of mainframes, it is surprising that COBOL/Fortran developers aren't making insane money like I thought they were.

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1. Kwpolska ◴[04 Dec 23 07:01 UTC] No.38514425[source]▶
I doubt the rental car system is complex. It was probably written decades ago and is now complete and bug-free. Keeping it running on a mainframe with emulated terminals is far cheaper than a modern rewrite, and the age/maintainability of their software is the least of their concerns.