An alarmingly large portion of the world's business and finance systems run on COBOL, and only a small community of programmers know it. IBM thinks Watson can help, but it's not guaranteed.

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A 64-year-old programming language called COBOL, which is still widely used in industries like banking and finance, is facing a shortage of skilled programmers. IBM has developed an AI-powered code assistant called watsonx to help convert COBOL code into more modern languages. The technology is new and unproven, but if successful, it could have far-reaching implications for code modernization and development.

The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore

The problem with having an AI re-write code in a more modern language is that it has to be able to do the job completely. If it ‘gets us 90% of the way there’, that’s great, but like, the first 80-90% of the code is the easy part. It’s that last 10-20% that can make or break the project. That’s where the sneaky edge cases live as well as the more tricky bits of logic. That’s the part that makes the re-writes so scary.
Until we address that, these old COBOL apps are going to stay in COBOL.
Edit:
Also AI has a hard time contextualizing code in such massive codebases. Good lord, this problem will not be solved by any kind of AI we can build this decade. Our legacy systems problem shall chug along for another decade.

My Dad is one of those people. He works with a leasing program called InfoLease and he is one of the few that still know how to program in its language. He has been working for Dell for several years. He is getting ready to retire next year.

People still use COBOL? Why? Get to Python or at least C?

Wow i wouldnt think COBOL is STILL around.