• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    IBM, eager to keep those legacy functions on its Z mainframe systems, wants that code rewritten in Java.

    In a technical blog post specific to COBOL conversion, IBM’s Kyle Charlet, CTO for zSystems software, steps up to the plate and says what a lot of people have said about COBOL: It’s not just the code; it’s the business logic, the edge-cases, and the institutional memory, or the lack thereof.

    IBM’s watsonx, Charlet writes, could help large organizations decouple individual services from monolithic COBOL apps.

    While COBOL codebases can be relatively stable and secure—once found to be among the least problematic in a broad survey—the costs of updating and extending them are gigantic.

    Legacy COBOL was one of the reasons the Office of Personnel Management suffered a deeply intrusive break-in in 2015, as the antiquated code could not be encrypted or made to work with other secure systems.

    But there’s a recurring argument that COBOL is good at managing business-specific systems and exchanges in ways that (some might argue) present fewer attack vectors.


    The original article contains 458 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    tbh refactoring (if it can be done safely) could be a huge help to orgs and fantastic AI use case. Rarely do businesses want to spend the resources to improve a codebase. Hope it goes well for IBM.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      How can you verify that it’s actually running safely? If you’d have a comprehensive testing framework in place, you wouldn’t need AI driven refactoring in the first place.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        You could code review the commits it makes I suppose. Saves you having to think of how to refactor something but still makes it fairly easy to mitigate the AI doing something terribly wrong.

  • skymtf@pricefield.org
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    1 year ago

    There goes my plan of getting a boomer from the nursing home and having him teach me COBOL

  • demonsword@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    IBM, eager to keep those legacy functions on its Z mainframe systems, wants that code rewritten in Java

    after years of “java is the new COBOL” jokes, here are hard news finally confirming it