Re:Ancient programming language gets new life in the cloud t...
by YeGoblynQueenne on Sunday August 27, 2023 @08:51AM
(#37282218)
This is going to end in tears - of laughter or despair, I cannot predict.
But tears nonetheless. COBOL code has typically gone through decades of bug-fixing and maintainance and is of industrial strength, just like the mainframe platforms it runs on, with reliability and uptimes that are insane compared to distributed, server-based systems. Replacing all that with java to run on servers is already a losing proposition. There's no way that Java on servers can reach the same reliability as COBOL on mainframes, even given some kind of perfect translation or transliteration between the two. Now, COBOL translated to Java by "AI", whatever that means for Watsonx (I think it means by "foundation models") is just asking for trouble.
Trouble, note well, that translates to many millions of hard $$$ lost.
But tears nonetheless. COBOL code has typically gone through decades of bug-fixing and maintainance and is of industrial strength, just like the mainframe platforms it runs on, with reliability and uptimes that are insane compared to distributed, server-based systems. Replacing all that with java to run on servers is already a losing proposition. There's no way that Java on servers can reach the same reliability as COBOL on mainframes, even given some kind of perfect translation or transliteration between the two. Now, COBOL translated to Java by "AI", whatever that means for Watsonx (I think it means by "foundation models") is just asking for trouble.
Trouble, note well, that translates to many millions of hard $$$ lost.
This is going to end in tears.